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" In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of the 'Red Empire' slowly and tentatively. "

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" Many times, I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people and wanted to cry. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Forget

Cry

Time

" I don't remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans. After the war, we children lived in a world of women. What I remember most is that women talked about love, not death. "

" I was born in a big city - Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine - but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. "

" Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important. "

" Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg. "

" I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged. "

" From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people. "

" My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts. "

" I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn't that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult. "

" There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them. "

Svetlana Alexievich

People

History

" I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Almost

Only

" We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs. "

" People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death. "

" Being in the public eye is easy for me because I come from a family of four generations of teachers, so I'm used to being around books and discussions. But to write, I very much need to be alone. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Easy

Eye

" I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion. "

" When I was a child, women spoke to me of how all they had was their memories, how their husbands went to war and never came back, so many tragedies. That chorus of voices filled my consciousness. It was part of life itself. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Memories

Life

" Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things. "

" Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn't true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love. "

" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "

" I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature. "

" Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave. "

" Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper. "

" I want to live at home. You can only write at home. "

" You might say that my work is just simply lying on the ground, and I go and I gather it, and I pick it up, and I put it together. "

" I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself. "

" When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other. "

" My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody - simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing, and beautiful women. "

" I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things. "

" I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time. "

" A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil. "