Vik Toon

“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.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“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.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“But I’m never lonely, a man who believes can never be lonely. I ride around the villages—I used to find spaghetti, flour—even vegetable oil. Canned fruit. Now I go to the cemeteries—people leave food and drink for the dead. But the dead don’t need it. They don’t mind. In the fields there’s wild grain, and in the forest there are mushrooms and berries. Freedom is here. I”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster