Talia > Talia's Quotes

“The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.”
― Turkish Proverbs

“You were in a mood to quarrel. Please inform me when this inclination passes.

(Catherine, in a letter to Grigory Potemkin).”
― Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I say "her," but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“When you go home
Tell them of us, and say
For your tomorrow,
We gave our today.”
― Patrick O'Donnell, Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat

“The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.”
― Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom

“I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Himmlisch ist's wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn's nich gelungen Hatt' ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir!

Loosely translated:

It is heavenly, when I overcome
My earthly desires
But nevertheless, when I'm not successful,
It can also be quite pleasurable.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All is over…I have nothing but you, remember that.”
“I can never forget what is my whole life.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“What is precious is not the reward but the work. And I wish you to understand that. If you work and study in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard to you; but when you work, if you love the work, you will find your reward in that.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I have nothing to make me miserable," she said, getting calmer; "but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can't imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything."

"Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly, smiling.

"The most utterly loathsome and coarse; I can't tell you. It's not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Vronsky meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love—he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires—boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If you could forget and forgive what happened."

He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, "I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“This child, with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina