Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Times
Prisoners
Live
Related Quotes:
" 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 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
" 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
" A totalitarian power is mainly busy in keeping itself alive. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Busy
Itself
Totalitarian
" My wish is to humanize history. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Wish
History
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Way
Freedom
Out
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
People
Together
Image
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
City
Father
Back
" '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
" 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
" 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
Communism
Dead
Process
" Love is what brings us into this world. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Brings
Love
Love Is
" 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
People
Great
Age
" There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Give
Need
Count
" No book about Soviet sacrifice was as strong as the women's stories I heard as a child. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Child
Book
Women
" What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Time
Earth
History
" Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Conquer
Impossible
Nature
" 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
Remember
Less
People
" 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
" 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 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 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
" Journalists do not write about human feelings. "
Svetlana Alexievich
About
Feelings
Write
" 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
" 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
Small
Soul
I Am
" I will never write fiction. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Will
Write
Fiction
" For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Airplane
Black
Boxes
" 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. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Space
Good
Interesting
" I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer. "
Svetlana Alexievich
Writer
Five
Wanted