Monika

“All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his Brother Nikolai. But that had been grief - this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike beyond the ordinary conditions of life; they were openings, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina