“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― The Goldfinch

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― The Secret History

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― The Goldfinch

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― The Goldfinch

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
― The Goldfinch

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― The Secret History

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― The Secret History

“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― The Secret History

“We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”
― The Goldfinch

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”
― The Secret History

Leo Tolstoy (Russian writer)
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Born : September 9, 1828
Died : November 20, 1910
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Tolstoy also spelled Tolstoi, Russian in full Lev Nikolayevich, Graf (count) Tolstoy, Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists.

Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written. War and Peace in particular seems virtually to define this form for many readers and critics. Among Tolstoy’s shorter works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is usually classed among the best examples of the novella. Especially during his last three decades Tolstoy also achieved world renown as a moral and religious teacher. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had an important influence on Gandhi. Although Tolstoy’s religious ideas no longer command the respect they once did, interest in his life and personality has, if anything, increased over the years.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Anna Karenina

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― The Kreutzer Sonata

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Anna Karenina

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― War and Peace

“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
― Anna Karenina