Suzanne

“Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties,” wrote Nabokov. “Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” Tolstoy sought the truth in two ways: as a fiction writer and as a moral preacher. He was more powerful in the former but kept being drawn back to the latter. And somehow, it’s this struggle, between (as Nabokov put it) “the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral,” that makes us feel Tolstoy as a moral-ethical giant. It’s as if he resorts to fiction only when he can’t help it and, having to make the sinful indulgence really count, uses it to ask only the biggest questions and answer these with supreme, sometimes lacerating honesty”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“...I think that woman can do a great deal for each other if they will only stop fearing what ‘people will think’ and take a hearty interest in whatever is going to fit their sisters and themselves to deserve and enjoy the rights God gave them. There are so many ways in which this can be done that I wonder they don’t see and improve them.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old Fashioned Girl

“How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“There was a sense of gravity and richness to his teaching because you knew he really believed what he was saying.”
― Winn Collier, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message