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Quote by Anthony Hulse

“You were sixteen when Chernobyl went up, Ollie.” Sangster recalled the incident. “Yes, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it, just as the other disasters I saw. I see the incidents just hours before they occur and are helpless to prevent it, as the details are usually too vague. No, Rachel, at least consoling the living does not warrant a spell in a straitjacket.”

Quote by Anthony Hulse

Book:Whispers of the Dead
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Whispers of the Dead

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Anthony Hulse

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“We came home. I took off all the clothes that I'd worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. he really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain...You can write the rest of this yourself. I don't want to talk anymore.”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“At night I wake up from my mother saying, "Sonny, why aren't you saying anything? You're not asleep, you're lying there with your eyes open. And your light's on." I don't say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I've come back from. And I can't tell anyone.”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“I've wondered why everyone was silent about Chernobyl, why our writers weren't writing much about it -- they write about the war, or the camps, but here they're silent. Why? Do you think it's an accident? If we'd beaten Chernobyl, people would talk about it and write about it more. Or if we'd understood Chernobyl. But we don't know how to capture any meaning from it. We're not capable of it. We can't place it in our human experience or our human time-frame. So what's better, to remember or to forget?”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“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?”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“His friend proposed to me. He'd been in love with me long ago, back when we were in school. Then he married my friend, and then they got divorced. "You'll live like a queen." He owns a store, has a huge apartment in the city, he had a dacha. I thought and thought about it. Then one day he came in drunk: "You're not going to forget your hero, is that it?" He went to Chernobyl, and I refused. I'm alive, and he's a memorial.”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking.”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“They wash the windows, the roof, the door, all of it. Then a crane drags the house from its spot and puts it down into the pit. There's dolls and books and cans all scattered around. The excavator picks them up. Then it covers everything with sand and clay, leveling it. And then instead of a village, you have an empty field. They sowed our land with corn. Our house is lying there, and our school and our village council office. My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike.”

Chernobyl
Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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