"I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it's more powerful than anything literature has to say."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Nobel laureates in LiteratureEssayistsInvestigative journalistsWomen authorsNobel laureates from Belarus
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
pp. 239–240
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alexievich
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Svetlana Alexievich
10 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Svetlana Alexievich →
Related Quotes
"What can art accomplish? The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being."
"Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel…"
"Is there anything more frightening than people?"
"My teacher, Ales Adamovich, whose name I mention today with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares o…"
"Suffering is our capital, our natural resource. Not oil or gas – but suffering. It is the only thing we are able to p…"
"I drove to a hospital for Afghan civilians with a group of nurses – we brought presents for the children. Toys, candy…"
"I will take the liberty of saying that we missed the chance we had in the 1990s. The question was posed: what kind of…"
"There was a time... when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism (or the October Revolution…"
"Twenty years ago, we bid farewell to the “Red Empire” of the Soviets with curses and tears. We can now look at that p…"
"Imitar equivale a moverse i fatigarse en el wagón de un ferrocarril: nos imajinamos realizar mucho i no hacemos más q…"