Svetlana Chmakova Quotes

I don't want to leave. ~ Svetlana Chmakova

Strength is a resource. If you have a lot and someone doesn't, you gotta share yours. ~ Svetlana Chmakova

What do you think of all this? Am I a friend or foe - or a little of each? Are the important things black and white, or maybe a little gray? ~ Svetlana Chmakova

If they're friends, then they've got your back . . . whether you're there or not. Friends won't "forget" about you. ~ Svetlana Chmakova

True. The school admin decided that a girls clothes were more important than her education. ~ Svetlana Chmakova

Yur Karyakin once wrote: 'We should not judge a man's life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.' And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We'll die, and then we'll become science, ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left." My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything. Can ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. And ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Happiness is beyond the mountains, but grief is just over the shoulder ~ Svetlana Alexievich

According to Darwin's theory, it's not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I hear about death so often that I don't even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they're worried about what'll happen after the nuclear war. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

It turned out the officer was escorting the soldier home. He'd gone mad: 'He's been digging ever since we left Kabul. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Nostalgia was diagnosed [as a medical illness] at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body internal and external well-being were treated together...Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac. ~ Svetlana Boym

To take just two examples: in the hope of obscuring the true impact of the war, some local authorities refused to allow special areas in cemeteries to be set apart for the graves of soldiers killed in Afghanistan; while others forbade the cause and place of death to be stated on gravestones or memorial shields. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

When you're part of a mob, the mob is a monster. A person in a mob is nothing like the person you sit and chat with in the kitchen. Drinking ~ Svetlana Alexievich

[it was not a] circle - just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad.
"That's so typical of your attitude," Svetlana said. "You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It's over two thousand years after his death, he's in Boston for the first time, they've named something after him - why should his first reaction be to get pissed off? ~ Elif Batuman

For a child, the loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I asked everyone I met what 'freedom' meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience - it's like they're from different planets. For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear;[...] For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you're not afraid of your own desires; ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Athena, Demeter, Andromeda, Cassiopeia ~ dearest thoughtful Svetlana, your glorious angelic light outshines the entire goddess pantheon of Mount Olympus, , your radiant splendor surpasses the luminous sunsets of a thousand distant worlds, , in all my galactic travels you are the only star whose elegant sway has the power to swing me into orbit, , may our cosmic dance last forever, , may our mutual tidal gravity eternally signal our telepathic presence in each others soulful wandering lives ~ Sean Terrence Best

I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. "What are you shooting?" people say to me. "Look around you. There's a war on in Chechnya." But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn't he who condescended to them? ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see ~ Svetlana Alexievich

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

But I was telling you about love. About my love...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko ~ Svetlana Alexievich

For twenty-seven years I was witness to the spiritual deterioration of my own father, watching day after day how everything human in him left him and how gradually he turned into a grim monument to his own self ... ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Moscow seethes and bubbles and gasps for air. It's always thirsting for something new, the newest events, the latest sensation. Everyone wants to be the first to know. It's the rhythm of life today. ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

Man lives with death, but he doesn't understand what it is. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

repentance, the response would be, "What do I have to repent for?" Everyone thought of ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga... ~ Svetlana Alexievich

It is human nature that rules the world, not governments and regimes. ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

It was as simply as that. And as complex. ~ Svetlana Meritt

Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I realize how much ballet gave me, and because of ballet, I'm known as a graceful gymnast. ~ Svetlana Boginskaya

Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat...You look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful...And the air...And the dear sun... ~ Svetlana Alexievich

There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

You know, party every day until 6 a.m. and then sleep during the day. ~ Svetlana Kuznetsova

Hard work is always hard work, for young gymnasts and old gymnasts. Whoever can handle this will be a champion. ~ Svetlana Boginskaya

Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language. "You think language is an end in itself. You don't believe it stands for anything. No, it's not that you don't believe - it's that you don't care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system."

"But it is a self-sufficient system."

"Do you see what you're saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He's cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It's like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there's this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you're the elite who speaks it - you can control everything.

"Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you're so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further - and then something went wrong. It couldn't continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else - int ~ Elif Batuman

They were told they were on a holy mission and that their country would remember them. Now people turn away and try to forget the war, especially those who sent us there in the first place. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Trees and flowers were often more meaningful to me than people. They always helped me, consoled me, giving the soul a chance to believe once more than the world was beautiful and sensible, that the mad absurdities and cruelties of men were against the laws of Nature and the Universal Mind; that sooner or later violence would suffer utter defeat on this Earth. No words collected in books were more effectively convincing to me than foliage, clouds, rippling waters, rain. ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don't need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it's unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we're built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We've never known anything else - hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn't recognize their own slavery - they even liked being slaves. I ~ Svetlana Alexievich

My daughter married a Italian. His name is Sergio. When they come stay with me, he and I have our kitchen dialogues... in Russian...We'll talk until morning. Sergio thinks that Russians love to suffer, that that's the trick of the Russian soul. For us, suffering is ' a personal struggle,' ' the path for salvation'. Italians aren't like that, they don't want to suffer. They love life, they believe is given to them to enjoy. Like...my daughter and Sergio will come home from the supermarket, and he'll be carrying the grocery bags. In the evening, she can play piano while he makes dinner. For me it was nothing like that: he'd try to take the bags from me, and I'd grab them away 'I'll do it. You shouldn't'. He'd come into the kitchen and I'd tell him, ' this isn't your place'. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

It should be judged primarily on grace, elegance and beauty rather than simply on mechanic tumbling. ~ Svetlana Khorkina

People who've come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity - we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: "shoot," "execute," "liquidate," "eliminate," or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as "arrest," "ten years without the right of correspondence,"*2 and "emigration." How ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Religion means a binding. If a man does not feel himself a part of the Universe, and does not hear its pulse, he is not religious. But once he has heard that pulse, he will be hearing it always. Every day his life will replenish itself from this inexhaustible source, eternal and powerful as the sun. ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

I don't think many people will remember me when I retire. ~ Svetlana Boginskaya