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Quote by Svetlana Alexievich

“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.”

Quote by Svetlana Alexievich

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

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Svetlana Alexievich

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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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“We started thinking about it -- I guess it must have been -- three years later. One of the guys got sick, then another. Someone died. Another went insane and killed himself. That's when we started thinking. But we'll only really understand in about 20-30 years. For me, Afghanistan (I was there two years) and then Chernobyl (I was there three months), are the most memorable moments of my life.”

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Book:Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
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“Okay, maybe you could move the ones that were above the earth, but what about the ones who were in the earth -- the bugs and the worms? And the ones in the sky? How do you evacuate a pigeon or a sparrow? What do you do with them? We don't have any way of giving them, the necessary information. It's also a philosophical dilemma. A perestroika of our feelings is happening here.”

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