Svetlana Papazov Quotes

As we know, the week has 168 hours. People spend on average only one hour at church on Sunday morning. What about the other 167 hours spent primarily at work, at home, and at play in a world quite intolerant of Christians, embracing other truths but opposing the truth of the Bible, enamored with narratives but rejecting the narrative of Jesus? What type of church prepares for that type of world? A Church for Monday! ~ Svetlana Papazov

I'm searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There's the one they use with children, another one for love. There's the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling--everywhere you go, you'll hear something different, and it's not just the words, there's something else, too. There's even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night... ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

There's something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person's courage in the face of danger. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Russian can't convince another Russian of anything without obscenities. I ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

You're young. Why are you doing this? That's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor. You'll just burn together." I was like a dog, running after them. I'd stand for hours at their doors, begging and pleading. And then they'd say: "All right! The hell with you! You're not normal! ~ Svetlana Alexievich

He suddenly opened his eyes and looked at everyone in the room. It was a terrible gaze, mad or maybe furious and full of fear of death ... Then something incomprehensible and frightening happened ... He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all ... The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh. ~ Svetlana Alliluyeva

I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father ~ Svetlana Alexievich

My prayer is simple. I say it silently. 'Lord, i cry unto me! Give ear!' Man is crafty only in evil, but he's so simple and open in his plain words of love. Even for philosophers, the word is only an approximation of the thought they have experienced. The word genuinely attunes to what's in our soul only in prayer, and in prayerful thoughts. I can feel it physically. 'Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!' And man too. Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man. That's it. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

At the Minsk tractor factory I was looking for a woman who had served in the army as a sniper. She had been a famous sniper. The newspapers from the front had written about her more than once. Her Moscow girlfriends gave me her home phone number, but it was old. And the last name I had noted down was her maiden name. I went to the factory where I knew she worked in the personnel department, and I heard from the men (the director of the factory and the head of the personnel department): "Aren't there enough men? What do you need these women's stories for? Women's fantasies…" The men were afraid that women would tell about some wrong sort of war. I visited a family…Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: "We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute." He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: "Prepare something for us." The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: "Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?" After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: "Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women's trifles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid." Later she whispered to me: "He studied The History of the Great Patriot ~ Svetlana Alexievich

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

At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He's from there! That ~ Svetlana Alexievich

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. ~ Svetlana Boym

Oh! Great Lady of Fascination! We arise in somnambulant awe and dance entranced as you glide slowly and softly through the Heavenly Dome and suffuse our presence with unfathomable desires for faerie worlds, where all is order, where all is beauty, where nuances of quality proliferate miraculously in myraids of delicious subtleties. ~ Lady Svetlana

isn't a hair, you can't just pull it out. And no ritual can make it stick. Why cry over it? Who ~ Svetlana Alexievich

often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Humanities" started sounding like a disease ~ 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

Is there anything more frightening than people? ~ Svetlana Alexievich

I don't like the word "hero." There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won't be able to. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We discussed how our lives were only beginning. There was joy and fear. Before we had been afraid of death, and now--of life...It was equally frightening. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

By continually increasing the difficulty of the sport, we are discouraging younger athletes from starting and continuing in the sport. But most importantly, we are losing the beauty of our sport. We do not want gymnastics to lose what makes it so great - its artistic beauty. ~ Svetlana Boginskaya

I'll explain it to you: it's terrible to remember, but it's far more terrible not to remember. ~ 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

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

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

I don't want to leave. ~ Svetlana Chmakova

We share a communist collective memory. We're neighbors in memory. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

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

Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. ~ Svetlana Boym

No one had taught us what freedom means. We'd only ever learned how to die for freedom. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

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

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

Svetlana had written about whether love was a game you could get infinitely good at, like in French novels - whether it was a matter of playing your cards right - or whether it existed between certain people in some kind of current and you just had to tap into it.
"So you think it's about playing your cards right?" I said.
"Pretty depressing, huh? Sometimes I think there could be two kinds of love. There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between certain people. Then there's the more common kind that's constructed."
It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. ~ Elif Batuman

I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them. ~ 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

records the lives of ideas. People don't write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Nostalgia is history without guilt. ~ Svetlana Boym

There's a fragment of some conversation, I'm remembering it. Someone is saying: "You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You're not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself." And I'm like someone who's lost her mind: "But I love him! I love him!" He's sleeping, and I'm whispering: "I love you!" Walking in the hospital courtyard, "I love you." Carrying his sanitary tray, "I love you. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

One of the poets says somewhere that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them. Leonid ~ Svetlana Alexievich