Svetlana Quotes

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.

Is there anything more frightening than people?

No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.

Whenever I’m worried about anything,” said this guy Ben, “I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.” I acknowledged that this was a great comfort. Svetlana

Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.

Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.

Yo tengo miedo. Tengo miedo de una cosa, de que en nuestra vida el miedo ocupe el lugar del amor.

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.

I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul.

Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is.

The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.

Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone- the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.

En la vida las cosas más terribles ocurren en silencio y de manera natural.

Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.

I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.

How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.

Fear is more human than bravery, you’re scared and you’re sorry, at least for yourself, but you force your fear back into your subconscious.

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally. Zoya

My mom says . . . there are bad people who hurt others for fun . . . and there are good people who do it by accident. Like, they make a mistake? I think you're a good person.

الرجال يقاتلون في الحرب، أما النساء فبعدها

People ask me: “Why don’t you take photos in color? In color!” But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there.

Sandra to Christie on Matt: So he's been a meanie today has he. The boy's got the subtlety of a brick to the head. I do apologize.

الضمير هو ترف بالنسبة الى جندي

If they're friends, then they've got your back . . . whether you're there or not. Friends won't "forget" about you.

Let time be the judge. Time is just, but only in the long term—not in the short term. The time we won’t live to see, which will be free of our prejudices.

Solo recuerdo lo que me ocurrió a mí. Recuerdo mi guerra. En la guerra hay mucha gente a tu alrededor, pero siempre estás sola, porque ante la muerte el ser humano siempre está solo. Recuerdo esa terrible soledad.

I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.

Courage in war and courage of thought are two different courages. I used to think they were the same.

People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.

Happiness is beyond the mountains, but grief is just over the shoulder

Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process.

Se dice que en la guerra te conviertes en mitad humano, mitad animal. Totalmente cierto... No hay otra forma de sobrevivir. Si te limitas a ser humano, no hay salvación. ¡Perderás la cabeza! En la guerra uno debe recordar algo perdido dentro de sí. Algo arcano... Algo que procede de los tiempos en que el hombre no era del todo humano...

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.

I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on—just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.

The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that's all the justice you'll find in this world.

Morirse no es difícil, solo da miedo.

In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing. Boundless

Truth is communal.

Es imposible tener un corazón para el odio y otro para el amor. El ser humano tiene un solo corazón, y yo siempre pensaba en cómo salvar el mío.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too. It would be like one of those Marguerite Duras books I tried to read in Svetlana’s aunt’s apartment. Elle pleure. Il pleure. Ils pleurent, tous les deux.

Strength is a resource. If you have a lot and someone doesn't, you gotta share yours.

We’ll die, and then we’ll become science,

Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

True. The school admin decided that a girls clothes were more important than her education.

A bullet is alone, and man is alone; a bullet flies wherever it likes, and fate twists a man however it likes.

Así es como vivo. Vivo a la vez en un mundo real y en otro irreal. Y no sé dónde estoy mejor.

Recordar es, sobre todo, un acto creativo. Al relatar, la gente crea, redacta, su vida.

I'm a product of my time. I'm not a criminal.

That’s how it was in the beginning. We didn’t just lose a town, we lost our whole lives.

The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.

[it was not a] circle—just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad. “That’s so typical of your attitude,” Svetlana said. “You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It’s over two thousand years after his death, he’s in Boston for the first time, they’ve named something after him—why should his first reaction be to get pissed off?

As for time, it is forever shrinking. Oppressed by multitasking and managerial efficiency, we live under a perpetual time pressure. The disease of this millennium will be called chronophobia or speedomania, and its treatment will be embarrassingly old-fashioned. Contemporary nostalgia is not so much about the past as about vanishing the present.

Today many people, especially the young, think it was only America that defeated Hitler. Little is known about the price the Soviet people paid for the victory—twenty million human lives in four years.

...nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.

You have only one friend in this world, yourself.

Penelope? Thank you. For not leaving me alone to deal with this . . . when things got hard. other people would have. You're a true friend.

For a child, the loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself.

The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal.

In the center there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die. And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill.

How did you make it out of there alive?” “My parents loved me a lot when I was little.” We’re saved by the amount of love we get, it’s our safety net. Yes…only love can save us. Love is a vitamin that humans can’t live without—the blood curdles, the heart stops. I

The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That's what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.

قالوا لنا يجب أن ننتصر، على من؟ على الذرة، الفيزياء، الفضاء!!!! النصر عندنا ليس حدث، بل عملية مستمرة

As my physics teacher always said, “My dear students! Just remember that money solves all problems, even differential equations.

Los tiempos cambian, pero ¿y los humanos?

My life has always been like a change jar. It’s full, then it’s empty, then it’s full again, then it’s empty again.

People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.

I'll explain it to you: it's terrible to remember, but it's far more terrible not to remember.

Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.

At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.

Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.

Goddess of immemorable cloudy veils, reveal your magickal powers so we may re-attune our psyches to your multi-dimensional realities and thereby draw your power to heal this worldly habitat and return it to the provocative Sisterhood of Your Milky Way.

Transcurrieron unos treinta años hasta que empezaron a rendirnos honores... A invitarnos a dar ponencias... Al principio nos escondíamos, ni siquiera enseñábamos nuestras condecoraciones. Los hombres se las ponían, las mujeres no. Los hombres eran los vencedores, los héroes; los novios habían hecho la guerra, pero a nosotros nos miraban con otros ojos. De un modo muy diferente... Nos arrebataron la Victoria, ¿sabes?

But,” Shane said. He had to say this next part. It had been eating away at him for too long. “You want to get married, right? To a woman, I mean. You’re not...like me. You like women. And I’m sure...Svetlana is gorgeous and fun and...all that stuff. Right?” “Yes,” Ilya said. “I do. She is. But.” “But?” Ilya shrugged, and he looked like he was possibly blushing. “I have this problem,” he mumbled. Shane waited. “I like women. I always was thinking that to get married would be nice. Kids. All of that. Someday. But...this problem will not go away.” Shane bit his lip. “Tell me about this problem.” “Is so annoying.” Ilya sighed, and Shane could see him fighting a grin. “Always I am with beautiful women. Wonderful women. Everywhere.” “Sounds rough.” “Yes. Listen. These women, they are so sexy and fun, but is no matter. I cannot stop thinking about this short fucking hockey player with these stupid freckles and a weak backhand.” “A weak backhand?” Shane couldn’t stop smiling. “Yes. And he is just so boring and he drives a terrible car and...that is my problem. All of these beautiful women and I am always wishing they were him.” Ilya bent to take his third shot. “Is terrible problem.” Fuck. Shane was going start crying right here in his games room. He swallowed and steadied himself. “Do you want the problem to go away?” “No,” Ilya said seriously, looking Shane dead in the eye. “I do not want the problem to ever go away.

Well, I admit it. I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even while I was shooting and killing them. I still do. You could even say I love them. I like their songs and prayers, as peaceful and timeless as their mountains.

The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father.

We were told that this was a just war, that we were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a wonderful socialist society.

¿Qué diferencia hay entre la muerte y el asesinato, dónde está la frontera entre lo humano y lo inhumano?

Мъжете се бояха, че жените „ще разкажат някаква друга война, и не както трябва.

Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don't need it. To hell with it!

Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.

I often thought that the simples fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinantes me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.

Oh! Dione of Opalescent Skin Ethereal. Your oospheric containment disperses argentous streams of velvety rays that cradle recesses of soul in gossamer of beatific visions.La Luna! Your enigmatic smile. Your watery countenance stirs the imagination and bestows inspiration on those receptive to Your Sacred Gifts.

I told you. There’s nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s pen. I had thoughts like, It’s not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn’t see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn’t care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn’t necessary. I also have medals and awards—but that’s because I wasn’t afraid of dying. I didn’t care! It was even something of an out. They’d have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it.

They die, but no one’s really asked us. No one’s asked what we’ve been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them. But I was telling you about love. About my love . . . Lyudmilla

There’s a fragment of some conversation, I’m remembering it. Someone is saying: “You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself.” And I’m like someone who’s lost her mind: “But I love him! I love him!” He’s sleeping, and I’m whispering: “I love you!” Walking in the hospital courtyard, “I love you.” Carrying his sanitary tray, “I love you.

We all live through it by ourselves, we don't know what else to do. I can't understand it with my mind. My mother especially has felt confused. She teaches Russian literature, and she always taught me to live with books. But there are no books about this. She became confused. She doesn't know how to do without books. Without Chekhov and Tolstoy.

It's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding areas, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. . . In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. . . The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn't break down until weeks or months later, at which point they'd die horribly.

He’s going to die.” I understood later on that you can’t think that way. I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: “Your cheeks are red. You’re getting better.” “Mom, take me out of the hospital. I’m going to die here. Everyone here dies.” Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There’s a line for the bathroom—everyone like me is in that line.

Oh! Great Lady of Fascination! We arise in somnambulant awe and dance entranced as you glide slowly and softly through the Heavenly Dome and suffuse our presence with unfathomable desires for faerie worlds, where all is order, where all is beauty, where nuances of quality proliferate miraculously in myraids of delicious subtleties.

¿Cómo elegir entre el amor y la muerte? ¿Entre el pasado y el ignorado presente? ¿Y quién se creerá con derecho a echar en cara a otras esposas y madres que no se quedaran junto a sus maridos e hijos? Junto a esos elementos radiactivos. En su mundo se vio alterado incluso el amor. Hasta la muerte. Ha cambiado todo. Todo menos nosotros.

Somebody betrayed us... The Germans learned the location of our partisan troop. They surrounded the forest from all sides. We were hiding in the deep woods, hiding in the swamps where the torturers did not go [...] A radio operator was with us. She gave birth recently. The baby was hungry... Wanting the breast... But the mother is starving, she has no milk, and the baby is crying. The Germans are nearby... With dogs... If the dogs hear the baby, we're all dead. All of us - thirty people... Do you understand? We make a decision... Nobody dares to tell her the commader's order, but the mother guesses it herself. She puts the bundle with the baby into the water and holds it there for a long time... The baby does not cry... Not a sound... And we cannot lift our eyes. We cannot look at the mother or at each other

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them. But I was telling you about love. About my love... -- Lyudmila, Ignatenko, wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko

I met this one man, he was saying that this is because we place a low value on human life. That it’s an Asiatic fatalism. A person who sacrifices himself doesn’t feel himself to be a unique individual. He experiences a longing for his role in life. Earlier he was a person without a text, a statistic. He had no theme, he served as the background. And now suddenly he’s the main protagonist. It’s a longing for meaning.

Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.” “But it is a self-sufficient system.” “Do you see what you’re saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He’s cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything. “Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.

For a while now, I have been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you,” Svetlana said. “And I think that’s the reason. It’s because we both make up narratives about our own lives. I think that’s why we decided not to live together next year. Although obviously it’s also why we’re so attracted to each other.” “Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives.” “But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don’t mean that she doesn’t have an inner life, or that she doesn’t think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She’s in my story – I’m not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It’s like an unspoken contract. With you, there’s more instability and tension, because I know you’re making up a story, too, and in our story, I’m just a character.” “I don’t know,” I said. “I still think everyone experiences their own life as a narrative. If you didn’t have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?” “That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.” “But I don’t think that’s because of our personalities,” I said. Isn’t it more about how much money our parents have? You and I can afford to pursue some narrative just because it’s interesting. You could go to Belgrade to come to terms with your life before the war, and I could go to Hungary to learn about Ivan. But Fern has to work over the summer.” “...Fern is just an example. Valerie’s parents are engineers, she doesn’t have to work, but she’s still more like Fern than she is like us” “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it feels elitist to look at it that way.” “Don’t you think you pretending not to be elitist is disingenuous?” Svetlana said. “If you really think about who you are, and what you value?

But… it was men writing about men—that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know with “a man’s voice.” We are all captives of “men’s” notions and “men’s” sense of war. “Men’s” words. Women are silent. No one but me ever questioned my grandmother. My mother. Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the “women’s” war but about the “men’s.” They tune in to the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful among their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, the war unknown to me. Not only to me, to all of us.

Under the mystichood ofNameless Bride, we grope in Her Sacred Darkness for plasmatic encounter, the fifth ionized state of matter. Our mundane sight of differentation and separation recedes into the magickal Abyss of Blackness where all is touch. We feel each other as tactile presences whose extended dimension stretches to the stars only to coalesce beyond galactic expanses in the white and worm-holes of Her ever spiraling Gown of Worlds beyond Worlds. Let us feel Her concrescence as we stroke each unique form in the unfathomable dimensions of Her perfect formfulness - ever-changing, ever-new, ever-variable in the rainbow myriads of infinite spasms of delight.