Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.
Svetlana Alexievich
Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.
'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.
There are horrible periods in which entire nations sink into the plague of darkness and hatred.
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.
Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.
Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.
From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.
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.
Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.
Lukashenko is very much like Trump, because democracy and Trump are incompatible things.
Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer nature.
The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.
There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.
I'm interested in love and in death. Everything evolves from these things.
When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other.
We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.
There is no need to give in to the compromise that totalitarian regimes always count on.
I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.
I believe that in the 21st century, we should arm ourselves with ideas.
What is life about? Two things: love and death.
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.
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.
Journalists do not write about human feelings.
It's very important to listen when someone is speaking up. I always keep my ear to the ground.
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.
The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there.
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.
Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse; it was a shock for everyone.
I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different.
I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time.
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.
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.
Love is what brings us into this world.
Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn't true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.
I don't think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being and how I can protect this humanity in a person.
I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much.
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.
The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.
I want to live at home. You can only write at home.
What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.
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 grew up in the countryside.
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.
I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.
