#tolstoy

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff. ↗

— Mike Tyson

#crap #deep #i #people #prison

I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. I knew, however, the most doomed approach would be to simply create stories that felt 'literary.' ↗

— Chris Ware

#carver #comics #confidence #connect #connor

There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency. ↗

— Louis Menand

#decisions #fate #history #individuals #predestination

I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books. ↗

— Jessica Pare

#being #books #dark #depressing #i

Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself. from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy ↗

— Joel Carmichael

#art #goethe #karenina #leo #tolstoy

…the role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous…. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#tolstoy #beauty

Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself. But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life. What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#death

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