Siberia on Fire: Stories and Essays
Valentin Rasputin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Perhaps the most important thing in life is for each person to stay headed in the right direction within his assigned place and not to veer off in vain or run around in circles on ill-defined quests.”
“I don't know how it is in mathematics, but in life the best proof for something lies in its opposite.”
“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.”
“There must be a reason for my being here...eh? All right, I'm going to die pretty soon, and others will come. And everything will be done differently around here. But all the same, I've carried on the things that meant a lot to my father. And he added (these words are clearly engraved in my memory), "If you want to know, I never harmed my own land.”
“There is such a thing as a person's spiritual memory, his spiritual experience, which must be present in each of us, regardless of our age. These are the main things, of a seemingly higher realm, that gives us moral momentum, that we derive from the events of our lives, and that hold interest not only for ourselves alone. When this occurs and when the moral residue of external events seems important to us, we naturally want to share it with others.”
“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.”
“Isn't it odd? Why do we always feel just as guilty when we think of our teachers as when we think of our parents? And not because of anything that happened at school -- no, not at all. It's because of what became of us later.”
“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”
“A person gets old not when he reaches old age, but, when he stops being a child.”
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