#tolstoy

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”) ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#heresy #heretics #tolstoy #faith

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#love #tolstoy #love

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#anna-karenina #avoiding #flattery #gaze #love

He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart [...] Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #love #love

She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #love #love

The greatest human achievement is love. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#love

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

#despair #leo-tolstoy #love #sadness #beauty

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not. ↗

— A. N. Wilson

#feels #oneself #shadow #tolstoy #whether

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#going #i #into #ring #tolstoy

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century. ↗

— Norman MacCaig

#century #great #great love #i #last