Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

My father died when I was only five years old, and that was the moment when I learned a cruel lesson that tomorrow, in fact, might not be another day.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

When you're alive and everything is going fine, why talk about things? Talking's for later, when talking's all there is that's left.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

I'm 64 years old and, yeah, I went through a transition in my life last year, with the death of my son, that woke me up to a lot of things. You know, I'm perfectly happy in my own little groove. Marching along, building my company, and you know, a happy person.

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

It is possible to take something beautiful and lasting out of the heart-wrenching experience of seeing the animal you love move inexorably toward death.

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

The value of a story like 'Deadline' is kids get to look at death at the perfect distance. They can put the book down. They can experience the story, rub up against it, but it's not real life.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

I know it sounds crazy, but I have had far more connection with my parents after their deaths.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

I have sometimes imagined my own death and brought myself to tears.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

I've dealt with losing close ones before, and I've been around friends that have lost friends at a young age. I think it's important to think about - not necessarily death, but about life and think about where you're going and how you want to be remembered and the legacy you want to leave.

I don't understand why God took him and didn't take me.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.