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" 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

Memories

Life

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

" 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. "

" I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself. "

" I want to live at home. You can only write at home. "

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" Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think - how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappear into darkness. "

" There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on. "

" People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death. "

" For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom. "

" What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time. "

" '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. "

" I will never write fiction. "

" I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism. "

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" 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. "

" We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs. "

" 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. "

" I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things. "

" There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred. "

" I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women. "

Svetlana Alexievich

Almost

Only

" From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people. "

" 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. "

" I'm interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits - or disdains. "

" Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone. "

" 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. "

" I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same. "