Looking at Women Looking at War Quotes

“The response to truth is often even more truth; that is why regimes fear even small bits of it.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“I guess when the world ends”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“It is striking how much we all laugh during this horrible war. We may not do it that much in front of foreign reporters, who mostly expect to see Ukrainian women's despair or heroism. The truth is, sometimes, tired of crying or of being unable to cry, we laugh like crazy as if proving that here we are, Ukrainians, still alive.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“But a picture did free Iryna Dovhan from Russian captivity. And though I am certainly not as good or famous a photographer as Mauricio Lima, who took the picture of Iryna Dovhan being beaten in Donetsk, I will decide that sometimes recording and intervening are indeed the same.
...
The American writer Susan Sontag thought that photographing was an act of nonintervention.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“Already at our borders are the future war criminals whom I might have met while travelling to Russia as a child, with whom I share my first language and the culture that will forever be part of me, just like Voldemort's magic was part of Harry Potter.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“My Ukrainian grandmother and two Ukrainian grandfathers didn't have such old things; for them, everything was gone with the wind in the turmoil of the last century in Ukraine, the heart of the bloodlands.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“I've heard that everyone is capable of killing, and those who say they aren't just haven't met the right person. An armed stranger entering my country might just be the right person.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“What did you wish for?” the guide asks”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“Since February 24, 2022, I turned from a writer into a war crimes researcher and then learned to be both to tell you, the world, the story of Ukrainian civil society’s quest for justice. Now there should also be a story of me learning to be a mother to my eleven-year-old son. But I’ll let him tell this one in the hope that our children and loved ones will understand, respect, and forgive our choices.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

“It's the first time I see Larysa without makeup, in gray, non-descript clothes, and with a lost look on her face. She was always the brightest, a brunette with beautiful eyes, flowery suits, colorful jewelry, and an incomparable expertise in law and women's rights. Now, a month after the full-scale Russian invasion, it seems that only the expertise remains. Larysa looks like her own shadow. I brought her colorful candies as a present; she is looking at them in disbelief as if colors all went away, broke into shades, and disappeared as if washed away by tears.

She talks, I listen. She has been listening to women throughout her law career. I have to listen to her now. Suddenly, she stops, looks at me, and asks:
"Can you see the future? I mean, I can see today, but I try to imagine our life in several years and I cannot. Even half a year or a month is hard. I just don't see it."
"I see it," I say.
She waits for me to elaborate.
"I see the future. I mean, we might get hit by the Iskanders at this very moment but at the same time, I somehow see Ukraine after the war. I don't know if we are in the future, but there is Ukraine after the war." I say, and turn away.”
― Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary