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'It occurs to no one to acknowledge a greatness not commensurate with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable meanness... There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.'

'They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What, me? My immortal soul? Ha, ha...' and he laughed till tears started to his eyes ...

Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its far-away depths. 'And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I! And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!' He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions.'

'He had long ago pictured to himself a future with Sonya, and that was all clear and simple just because it had all been thought out and he knew all there was in Sonya, but it was impossible to picture a future with Marya, because he did not understand her but simply loved her. Reveries about Sonya had something merry and playful in them, but to dream of Marya was always difficult and a little frightening.'

Holy shit... Borodino may be one of the greatest sequences ever written

'He now experienced a glad consciousness that everything that constitutes men's happiness—the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself—is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with... With what? ... He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.'

'In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them and act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary, and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.'

'The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope and light; the other half is everything where she is not, and there all is gloom and darkness...'

'You'll die and know all, or cease asking.'

'At that moment it meant nothing to him, or what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him, and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently.'

'His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with clouds flying over it ...

'He felt ashamed; he felt that he was occupying someone else's place here beside Hélène. "This happiness is not for you," some inner voice whispered to him. "This happiness is for those who have not in them what there is in you."'

'Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return—that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.'

😭😭😭

A defeated, airless, ugly feeling rose in her whenever she heard a person of her parents' generation talking brightly about home ownership, or foreign holidays... She felt this way sometimes simply if someone spoke about the future -- even the very near future -- in optimistic terms.

Shelley had long grown accustomed to the expectation that she was fated to be always on the losing side. New Zealand had been governed by the centre right since before she had been eligible to vote, and she could find little to excite her in any of the parties supposedly in opposition.

'If recovering is completely rebecoming something ing you once were, Mary didn't recover, just like nobody ever does from anything.'

'The greensand rock of the Cap was now thoroughly burnished by the sun. In these moments its similarity in colour to the churches of the region was unignorable. And who was to say it WASN'T a church, just because human hands had not built it? After all, it did what churches were supposed to do: it reached for the sky and filled those in its vicinity with awe and fear and perhaps a curious kind of reassurance.'

'How was it possible to be afraid in love, Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger every day? And every night. Every night and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.'

'Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.'

'If any persons suppose that this Reform will lead to ulterior measures they are mistaken: for there is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage and the ballot than I am. My object is not to favour, but to put an end to such hopes and projects.' - Lord Grey on his 'Great Reform Act' of 1832.

Good grief.

'Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.'

'...since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts or his sorrow, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity.'

'She would have been glad of someone in whom to confide all this; but how to describe an intangible unease, that shifts like the clouds and eddies like the wind? Lacking the words, she had neither the opportunity nor the courage.'

'The chief of the township broke all the rules of moderation. Inside his tomb, there was a long list of modern luxuries... a room set aside for a nightclub with karaoke equipment. He even built a nice carved stone chair, specifically reserved for his meeting with the president of a multinational corporation in the world of the dead.'

Looking back upon the long crisis of his own life (for so he perceived it, as if his selfhood was balanced, always, upon the point of choice—but what choice, he did not know, for this ambivalence was without a real beginning, and without a perceptible end) he felt only disassociated: from his own work, from his father's wishes, from the circumstances under which his country, and his family, had been shamed.

'Gold was not a treasure—this Tauwhare knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past.'

'He ordered a large scotch for himself, because he wanted to give the impression of being kind of a lush, and also because he wanted a large scotch.'

'What do I really want?' he thinks. This is, of course, an extremely good question. It was just such a pity that, life being as it tended to be, it so rarely came as part of a matched pair, with an extremely good answer.

'Tragedy puts something above humanity; so does Comedy; Romance puts humanity first.'

"'I suppose it's part of the human condition silly-clever people are always grizzling about,' said Liesl. 'If you want truth, I suppose you must shoot the film from God's point of view and with God's point of focus, whatever it may bem and I bet the result won't look much like cinema verité.'"

'Man is a noble animal, Davey. Not a good animal; a noble animal.'