#tolstoy

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

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#dishonesty #intellect #pride #stupidity #tolstoy

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #literature #russia #change

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel. ↗

— Bob Woodward

#characters #complicated #immensely #novel #scandal

The difference between what he had been then and what he now was, was enormous...Then he was free and fearless...now he felt himself caught in the meshes of a stupid, empty, valueless, frivolous life...He remembered how proud he was at one time of his straightforwardness, how he had made a rule of always speaking the truth...and he was now sunk deep in lies...lies considered as truth by all who surrounded him. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#ressurrection #life

Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word'or, at any rate, the beginning of it. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#dostoyevsky #tolstoy #art

In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#economics #government #salaries #supply-and-demand #tolstoy

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? ↗

— Elif Batuman

#tolstoy #unhappiness #family