# Anna Karenina Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B0B4C2XG13 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B4C2XG13 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13) ## Highlights There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. — location: [1463](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=1463) ^ref-51868 --- The discussion was about a fashionable question: is there a borderline between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity, and where does it lie?* — location: [3234](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=3234) ^ref-4563 --- He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. — location: [3693](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=3693) ^ref-736 --- ‘But that’s the aim of civilization: to make everything an enjoyment.’ ‘Well, if that’s its aim, I’d rather be wild.’ — location: [4430](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=4430) ^ref-37525 --- ‘Understand,’ he said, ‘that it isn’t love. I’ve been in love, but this is not the same. This is not my feeling, but some external force taking possession of me. I left because I decided it could not be, you understand, like a happiness that doesn’t exist on earth; but I have struggled with myself and I see that without it there is no life. And I must resolve …’ — location: [4657](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=4657) ^ref-7283 --- The terrible thing is that we older men, who already have a past… not of love, but of sins … suddenly become close with a pure, innocent being; it’s disgusting, and so you can’t help feeling yourself unworthy.’ — location: [4675](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=4675) ^ref-21633 --- ‘Yes, I understand that his position is terrible; it’s worse for the guilty than for the innocent,’ she said, ‘if he feels guilty for the whole misfortune. But how can I forgive him, how can I be his wife again after her? For me to live with him now would be torture, precisely because I loved him as I did, because I love my past love for him — location: [7343](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=7343) ^ref-55132 --- ‘Oh! how good to be your age,’ Anna went on. ‘I remember and know that blue mist, the same as in the mountains in Switzerland. The mist that envelops everything during the blissful time when childhood is just coming to an end, and the path away from that vast, cheerful and happy circle grows narrower and narrower, and you feel cheerful and eerie entering that suite of rooms, though it seems bright and beautiful . .. Who hasn’t gone through that?’ — location: [7744](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=7744) ^ref-3894 --- Kitty looked into his face, which was such a short distance from hers, and long afterwards, for several years, that look, so full of love, which she gave him then, and to which he did not respond, cut her heart with tormenting shame. — location: [8273](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=8273) ^ref-43187 --- When he saw it all, he was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of setting up that new life he had dreamed of on the way. All these traces of his life seemed to seize hold of him and say to him: ‘No, you won’t escape us and be different, you’ll be the same as you were: with doubts, an eternal dissatisfaction with yourself, vain attempts to * — location: [9536](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=9536) ^ref-48694 --- improve, and failures, and an eternal expectation of the happiness that has eluded you and is not possible for you.’ — location: [9564](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=9564) ^ref-35889 --- Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She wanted too much to live herself. When she read about the heroine of the novel taking care of a sick man, she wanted to walk with inaudible steps round the sick man’s room; when she read about a Member of Parliament making a speech, she wanted to make that speech; when she read about how Lady Mary rode to hounds, teasing her sister–in–law and surprising everyone with her courage, she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to do, and so, fingering the smooth knife with her small hands, she forced herself to read. — location: [10112](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=10112) ^ref-52371 --- And the son, just like the husband, produced in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality, she had to descend into reality to enjoy him as he was. — location: [10689](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=10689) ^ref-24452 --- In his Petersburg world, all people were divided into two completely opposite sorts. One was the inferior sort: the banal, stupid and, above all, ridiculous people who believed that one husband should live with one wife, whom he has married in church, that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, a man manly, temperate and firm, that one should raise children, earn one’s bread, pay one’s debts, and other such stupidities. This was an old–fashioned and ridiculous sort of people. But there was another sort of people, the real ones, to which they all belonged, and for whom one had, above all, to be elegant, handsome, magnanimous, bold, gay, to give oneself to every passion without blushing and laugh at everything else. — location: [11228](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=11228) ^ref-35667 --- He knew very well that for those people the role of the unhappy lover of a young girl, or of a free woman generally, might be ridiculous; but the role of a man who attached himself to a married woman and devoted his life to involving her in adultery at all costs, had something beautiful and grand about it and could never be ridiculous, — location: [12210](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=12210) ^ref-24638 --- ‘Love …’ she repeated slowly with her inner voice, and suddenly, just as she freed the lace, added: ‘That’s why I don’t like this word, because it means too much for me, far more than you can understand,’ and she looked him in the face: ‘Good–bye!’ — location: [13438](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=13438) ^ref-38018 --- Alexei Alexandrovich was not a jealous man. Jealousy, in his opinion, was insulting to a wife, and a man ought to have trust in his wife. Why he ought to have trust – that is, complete assurance that his young wife would always love him – he never asked himself; but he felt no distrust, because he had trust and told himself that he had to have it. But now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to have trust was not destroyed, he felt that he stood face to face with something illogical and senseless, and he did not know what to do. Alexei Alexandrovich stood face to face with life, confronting the possibility of his wife loving someone else besides him, and it was this that seemed so senseless and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself. All his life Alexei Alexandrovich had lived and worked in spheres of service that dealt with reflections of life. And each time he had encountered life itself, he had drawn back from it. Now he experienced a feeling similar to what a man would feel who was calmly walking across a bridge over an abyss and suddenly saw that the bridge had been taken down and below him was the bottomless deep. This bottomless deep was life itself, the bridge the artificial life that Alexei Alexandrovich had lived. For the first time questions came to him about the possibility of his wife falling in love with someone, and he was horrified at them. — location: [13513](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=13513) ^ref-1200 --- ‘No, you’re a lucky man. You have everything you love. You love horses – you have them; dogs – you have them; hunting – you have it; farming – you have it.’ ‘Maybe it’s because I rejoice over what I have and don’t grieve over what I don’t have,’ said Levin, remembering Kitty. — location: [15187](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B4C2XG13&location=15187) ^ref-18981 ---