Quotes by Belarusian Authors

In my youth poverty enriched me but now I can afford wealth.

Whatever course you have chosen for yourself it will not be a chore but an adventure if you bring to it a sense of the glory of striving ... if your sights are set far above the merely secure and mediocre.

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.

Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left.

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

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga...

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.