Passing passages

I want to tell you something, which may not make any sense, but I should say it, just so that one day you'll remember it and, may be it will make you feel better. At a certain part in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are. Especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself, "But I am this person." And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love. ~Miss Dodger (Phoebe in wonderland, 2008)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: The longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found. With equal passion I have s

"I unhappy?" she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an ecstatic smile of love. "I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy. I unhappy? No, this is my unhappiness...." ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

"All is over," she said; "I have nothing but you. ... Remember that." ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life ... gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions ... was an insult to one's wife, and one ought to have confidence in one's wife. Why one ought to have confidence – that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife would always love him – he did not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love ... should be. And if you don't love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

She was an honorable woman who had bestowed her love ... upon him, and he loved her, and therefore she was in his eyes a woman who had a right to the same, or even more, respect than a lawful wife. He would have had his hand chopped off before he would have allowed himself by a word, by a hint, to humiliate her, or even to fall short of the fullest respect a woman could look for. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

Kitty expected Vronsky to ask her for a waltz, but ... he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed slightly, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had only just put his arm round her waist and taken the first step when the music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards – for several years after – that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than ... for him, a man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy of her. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

"No, I'd better not speak of it," he thought, when ... she had gone in before him. "It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be put into words. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy