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" Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Union
Everyone
Nobody
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" Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now. "
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" I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women. "
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" For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom. "
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Buy
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" Putin is not a politician. Putin is a KGB agent. And whatever he does is provocations, which KGB is usually involved in. "
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" Art is always kind of snooping and listening in. "
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" In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone. "
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" '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
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" Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Theme
Authoritarian
Closed
" My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Amazing
Father
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" I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much. "
Svetlana Alexievich
People
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" Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Precious
Human
Nothing
" I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that, and finally, I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts; I'm writing a history of human feelings. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Eyes
Writing
Vision
" 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
" 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
" There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Give
Need
Count
" 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
" 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
" 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
Me
Eye
" Communism has not died. We naively thought in the '90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back. "
Svetlana Alexievich
True
Communism
Dead
" A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Only
Doing
Evil
" 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
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Story
" Love is what brings us into this world. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Brings
Love
Love Is
" I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Love
Greatest
Voice
" I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. "
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Feelings
Life
Thoughts
" 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
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" Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Always
Reality
Paper
" The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Find
Internet
People
" 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
Me
People
History
" I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Tools
Happens
I Am
" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Times
Prisoners
Live