83 Quotes by Valentin Rasputin

Lately, Nastoyna felt that she had no right to criticize anyone at all -- no man, no animal, no bird, because each lived his own life, which was not in his control and which he could not change.

Why seek some higher truth and service, when all the truth is in the fact that you're worth nothing and won't be worth anything anymore, that everything that you came into the world to do, you've done long ago, and that your only work now is to be a burden to others. Is that so? Is it?

She had to live a long and wretched life to admit to herself at its end that she hadn't understood anything about it.

Who could say why worthwhile people have worthless children?

What was so wrong with us? We were young, healthy, matched in every way. Live and be happy. No, I had to show my strength, be moody. What a fool. And I didn't understand that I was a fool; after all, I do have some brains, but I couldn't stop myself.

He was lying with his eyes closed--it was easier to talk that way and he spoke with that searing, convulsive anger that surfaces when there's no one to direct it against.

Those of us who where there would not have survived without those of you who remained here. Because the man fights and the woman feeds, the man hates the enemy and the woman a thousand miles away softens his heart with herself and the children so that his heart won't turn to stone.

What do we mean by individuality? It is a unified plurality, an enlargement of one's possibilities and their subordination to the principal purpose that determines all. Without a purpose, individuality does not exist.

Believe them and they'll tell you all sorts of things.