83 Quotes by Valentin Rasputin

It's still not tea without a samovar. Just water, that's all.

And here, like everything else, life changed from a whole number into a fraction with a numerator and a denominator, and it became difficult to figure out what was above the line and what was below it

Oh don't torture my heart! I'll die of sadness in one week there. Living among strangers! How can you transplant an old tree?

Let them drown me, if that's what they want. Let them. You die once. What's there to be afraid of?

Everything that just recently had seemed eternal and solid as rock was so quickly turned into rack and ruin you just wanted to shut your eyes and forget.

The person who does a truly good deed does not remember it as long as does the person for whom it is done. And this is how it ought to be. A truly good deed, by definition, is not done with the expectation of instant return ("I scratched your back, now you scratch mine!").

On the contrary, good deed is altruistic and confident of its own quiet but wonder-working power. And if, after many years, a person's past good deed comes back to him from a different quarter, this means it has made the rounds of that many more people and the circle of its effect has grown that much wider.

Hunger, when there is something to cure it with, is easy to cure.

If you're being swept away, off somewhere, then why count the pebbles on the shore; they're on the shore, after all.