Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

I mean, honestly, we have to be clear that the life for many Afghan women is not that much different than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago. The country has lived with so much violence and conflict that many people, men and women, just want it to be over.

In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

There are real consequences when women speak out. It's really dangerous, and it takes real courage. We are still speaking out against a white male majority. Forget the glass ceiling. We haven't even broken the glass floor!

If I take a bump or bruise along the way, that's nothing compared to the sacrifices that the women whose shoulders I stand upon made along the way.

I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.

I've been fighting since I was 15. I know what war is.

It's time Pakistani women are able to stand up and hold their oppressors accountable, no matter how strong or influential they are. Don't be scared. They are strong because we are weak - lets change that.

War made my everyday problems seem much smaller, and when it is hard sometimes, I just remember that it could be much worse.

I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.

My military experience... I can recall so many different emotions from that.

War and love - they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them, you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer.

You know, I had gone to war.

Sometimes I'm frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I'm happy, you know. But war is not a time of joy.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

Movies like that aren't about the visual effects and explosions. They're human stories about family, about life, about death.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.