“They asked all sorts of questions, but one really cut into my memory. This boy, stammering and blushing, you could tell he was one of the quiet ones, asked: "Why couldn't anyone help the animals?" This was already a person from the future. I couldn't answer that question. Our art is all about the sufferings and loves of people, but not of everything living. We don't descend to their level: animals, plants, that other world. And with Chernobyl man just waved his hand at everything.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“The Soviets had to choose whether to show Blix the toilet facilities and hide the super-secret radar or vice versa.”
Source: Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
“Even if it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“A life well lived is not measured by what you possess, but by how you live and love.”
Source: The Light in the Heart
“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.”
Source: Whispers of the Dead
“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.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“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.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“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?”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“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?”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“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.”
Source: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster