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" It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Up
Always
Important
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" I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Ideas
21st Century
Believe
" 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
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Work
You
Say
" Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Conquer
Impossible
Nature
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Love
Hate
I Am
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Beautiful
Women
Fishing
" I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu. "
Svetlana Alexievich
World
Stalin
Love
" Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Them
Characters
Idea
" I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Understand
I Can
Humanity
" Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Love
Power
Always
" Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Precious
Human
Nothing
" I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Books
Years
Time
" There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Beginning
Rules
Writing
" We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Others
Heroes
Ideas
" There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Sink
Darkness
Hatred
" Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women's emancipation is only a slogan in - but also, I should say, in many places outside - the Soviet Union. But especially in the militaristic Soviet society, people only thought of life in terms of struggle and the workers' toil. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Struggle
Women
Life
" I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different. "
Svetlana Alexievich
You
Want
Story
" I grew up in the countryside. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Up
Grew
Countryside
" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Times
Prisoners
Live
" I have three homes: my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I have lived my whole life; Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born; and Russia's great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. All are very dear to me. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Myself
Mother
Father
" Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Long
Now
Holiday
" I will never write fiction. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Will
Write
Fiction
" Stalin's machine can be started up again at only a moment's notice: the same informers, the same denunciations, the same tortures. The same universal, all-devouring terror. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Only
Up
Again
" 'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things. "
Svetlana Alexievich
People
Women
War
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
War
Death
Love
" People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Death
Speak
Love
" Art is always kind of snooping and listening in. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Always
Listening
Kind
" Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Politician
He
Whatever
" I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much. "
Svetlana Alexievich
People
Love
Very
" There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Give
Need
Count