Quotes About Svetlana Alexievich

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

I'm interested in the history of the soul: the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits - or disdains.

Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack. I put Flora's book onto the Hard Stack, which included Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, two works by Svetlana Alexievich, and other books on species loss, viruses, antibiotic resistance, and how to prepare dried food. These were books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped. Still, I usually managed to read the books in my Hard Stack, eventually.