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Valentin Rasputin Books

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“How easy and wonderful it is to live in happy days and how bitter and accursed it is in miserable days! Why can't people save up the one to soften the pain of the other? Why is there always a chasm between the two? Where were you, what games were you playing when your fate was being decided? Why did you let them chop off your wings, without thinking, just when you needed them most, when you need to fly and not crawl from disaster?”

“There was nothing more unfair in the world than when something, be it tree or man, lived on to uselessness, to the point when it became a burden; that of the multitude of sins let loose upon the world to be prayed away and redeemed, this was the only one that was unbearable. The tree at least would fall, rot, and fertilize the earth. But man? Is he at least good for that? Then why bear old age if it brings nothing but discomfort and suffering?”

“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.”

“How many people, healthy and strong do not distinguish their own, personal, God-given feelings from the common, dime-a-dozen feelings. Those people get into bed with the same unbridled pleasure, ready for anything, that they sit at a table with: just to be satisfied. And they cry and laugh looking around--to make sure that they are seen laughing and crying so that their tears do not go to waste. They were played out: touch them a special way--and they won't understand, they won't respond, not a single string will vibrate with a sensitive quiver. It's too late for them--they are deaf and dumb, and they will never touch anyone that way either. And all because they did not want or did not know how to be alone with themselves, they had forgotten and lost themselves, and now they couldn't remember or find themselves.”

“Let them, let them scratch where it itches, it's a real human itch to gossip, to go over someone's bones until they're picked clean. They can't live without it. And you just keep quiet, do your work, and don't taunt them--they'll stop sooner. And then it'll be someone else's turn, and you'll be with the others again. Is this the first time? The very thing they blame you for, they'll praise you for later. People…”

“هم يضحكون: الكبير(العجوز) مثل الصغير، ويقصدون بذلك أن أحدهما فقد عقله، أما الثاني لم يمتلكه بعد. هذا صحيح، الكبير والصغير هما فقط القادران بحساسية وحدة أن يُدهَشا لوجودهما، ولكل ما يحيط بهما في كل خطوة.”

“Everything, that she was saying, now, everything that she saw and heard, took place in a deep numbness, in which all the senses are stilled and a person exists not in one's own life but with some emergency life that is stuck onto one. In such situations fear, pain, surprise and enlightenment come later, and until such time as one comes to one's senses, this sober, sturdy, and almost unfeeling mechanism takes over.”