Author of quotes: Svetlana Alexievich. Page 1

If you do not forget the war, there is a lot of hatred. And if the war is forgotten, a new one begins. That's what the ancients said.

I dreamed! I regretted that I was not born in the seventeenth or forty-first ... And now I think differently: I do not want to live in history, in historical time. My little life is immediately defenseless. Great events trample her down without noticing. Without stopping ... (Thinks.) After us only history will remain ... Chernobyl will remain ... Where is my life? My love?

Chernobyl ... We will no longer have another world ... At first, when they pulled the soil out from under our feet, they splashed out this pain frankly, but now the realization came that there is no other world and nowhere to go. The feeling of a tragic settlement on this Chernobyl land, a completely different attitude. The "lost" generation is returning from the war ... Let's remember Remarque? And a “confused” generation lives with Chernobyl ... We were confused ... Only human suffering remained unchanged ... Our only capital. Irredeemable!

All our lives we have fought or prepared for war, we know so much about it - and suddenly! The enemy's image has changed. We had another enemy ... Enemies ... The mowed grass killed. Caught fish, caught game. Apple ... The world around us, formerly pliable and friendly, now inspired fear. Old people, leaving for evacuation and still not imagining that forever - looked at the sky: “The sun is shining ... There is no smoke, no gas. They don't shoot. Well, is this a war? But you have to become refugees ... "A familiar ... unfamiliar ... world.

The night of April 26, 1986 ... In one night we moved to another place in history. We made a leap into a new reality, and it, this reality, turned out to be higher not only our knowledge, but also our imagination. The connection of times was broken ... The past suddenly turned out to be helpless, there was nothing to rely on, in the omnipresent (as we believed) archive of mankind there were no keys to open this door. I heard more than once in those days: "I can't find such words to convey what I saw and experienced", "no one told me anything like this before", "I haven't read about it in a single book or seen it in a movie." ...

So many times art has rehearsed the apocalypse, tried different technological versions of light, but now we know for sure that life is much more fantastic.

I catch myself thinking that I always want to quote Dzerzhinsky himself. His diaries. His letters. And I do this not out of a desire to facilitate my journalistic task in any way, but because of my love for his personality, for the word he said, for the thoughts he felt.

You lived at the time. And suddenly it's your fault that you lived at that time. Suffered. Suffered. Never mind. You're still guilty.

She rushed, she spent her whole life rushing between reality and fictional. I wanted someone to love her, to need her, "like bread, like water." I wanted love so much, passionately, that I invented it, rushed to people like jumping from a height, spread out. In each of us there is a vessel of love, if it is not filled in childhood, then all your life you will suffer from thirst and unquenchment. And not to be saved, not to be protected. In her vessel was only on the bottom ...

The party is a conscience, an honor... And doubts did not come to mind ... Each injustice was seen as a special case, where there was a specific culprit. Tell me anyone at that time about the guilt of the idea, about the responsibility of the idea? Mad! I wouldn't run to denounce him, but I would call him a madman, a traitor. Whatever evil was being done before my eyes, I was looking for the culprit: is it him or not... And the fact that he is part of the idea, the atom of the evil idea, the molecule, and in other circumstances would be a different person, we did not understand, no one. That's where now not only me, but many people have the feeling that we lived not our own, but someone's life. Could be other people, another country... If it wasn't for this idea... I don't blame people (even my recent executioners), I blame the idea... It is proved to me that an idea is born in the human head. But I still hate the idea, and people, their behavior can explain to themselves. What can a soldier choose in the ranks? No problem! Keep up!

Man is the abyss and the sky at the same time.

We think little about the nature of our ideals, and it is not completely clear to us. What's in the depths of the subconscious? Tyutchev said: "Russia cannot be understood with the mind..." it is beyond reason, consciousness... In other boundaries... Until now, no one can explain what happened to everyone in the seventeenth year? Revolution? An outbreak of mass banditry? Collective insanity? But at that time, many people (intellectuals!) experienced it as happiness ... Holiday! Communism lives in our subconscious... We are closer to romantic, heroic, and boring where reality, pragmatism. What does the favorite hero of Russian fairy tales Ivanushka-fool do? Crafts, builds? Nothing like that. He sits on the stove and waits for a miracle: a goldfish, or a beautiful princess to marry her... We are all waiting for a miracle or a just king...

Have you ever thought that the idea devoured, corrupted and disfigured the best? It opened up to you, you saw her bloody face, and we looked, loved something else - touching, poetic ... What a painful release ... Torture ... Monolith, block! My God! You are not able to escape there, like a butterfly in cement ... You cannot tear yourself off. Who are you? You are only a monolith, without "I", with everyone. When did I realize this? At fifty ... In a madhouse ... This is a crazy story, Soviet detective ...

Death is like love. And the last moment - terrible and ugly convulsions. We are not able to return from death, but out of love we return. And we can remember how it was... Have you ever drowned, have you been dragged by the vir? I was drowning... The more you resist, the less strength. Humble yourself and get to the bottom. There is already your choice: either you want to die, or you want to live. If you want to live - break through the sky of water, come back. But first, get to the bottom...