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" Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. "

Svetlana Alexievich

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" I don't love great ideas. I love the little human being. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented: there is so much to it; the truth is varied and scattered across the world. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I'm not a public person. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying degrees, return again and again. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I do not remember any questions in my childhood other than questions about death and about loss, and it was clear that the books that filled the house were not as interesting as the conversations outside. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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

" My wish is to humanize history. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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

" I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.' "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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

" '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

" 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. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I have collected the history of 'domestic,' 'indoor' socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being... a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Love is what brings us into this world. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Showing just the dark side doesn't always work. The important thing is to show what we can learn from dark things, what good we find there. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" What is life about? Two things: love and death. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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

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

Svetlana Alexievich

" I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing. "

Svetlana Alexievich

" 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

" What you have to remember about Belarus is that it's a small state - it has a population of less than 10m people - and like many small states, it has to be very careful about its relationships. "

Svetlana Alexievich