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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
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" I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish 'The Unwomanly Face of War,' but then it changed. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Get
Face
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
" I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Tools
Happens
I Am
" I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Moral
Think
Deceived
" 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
Me
Memories
Life
" 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 lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Love
Greatest
Voice
" 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
House
Loss
Remember
" 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
" Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Skin
Leave
Hatred
" 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
" Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Theme
Authoritarian
Closed
" 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 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
Mind
Truth Is
Fact
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Men
Live
Interesting
" I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Think
Sit
Own
" In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train... I listen... More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Train
Listen
Street
" People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Death
Speak
Love
" The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Human Being
Purpose
Within
" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Times
Prisoners
Live
" I want to live at home. You can only write at home. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Write
You
Want
" A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Busy
Itself
Totalitarian
" Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Precious
Human
Nothing
" We thought we'd leave communism behind, and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can't leave this and become free, because these people don't understand what freedom is. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Communism
You
Thought
" 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
" 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
Work
Dark
Important
" I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much. "
Svetlana Alexievich
People
Love
Very
" All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Soul
History
Human
" 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
" I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Great
Suffering
People