Thomas’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

“She did not know it, she would not have believed it, but under the seemingly impenetrable layer of silt that covered her soul, thin, tender young needles of grass were already breaking through, which were to take root and so cover with their living shoots the grief that oppressed her, that it would soon not be seen or noticed. The wound was healing from inside.”

“Love? What is love?” he thought. “Love hinders death. Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is connected only by that. Love is God, and to die-means that I, a part of love, return to common and eternal source.”

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.”

“I not only understood her, but it was that inner force, that sincerity, that inner openness, that soul of hers, which was as if bound by her body, it was that soul that I loved...”

“He remembered her the way he had seen her the last time, and all his doubts vanished, not because she answered the questions that presented themselves to him, but because her image immediately transferred him to a different, bright realm of inner activity, in which no one could be right or wrong, into a realm of beauty and love for which it was worth living.”

“There are two sides to each man’s life: his personal life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental, swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed to him. Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.”

Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which, having flown with inexpressible speed through immeasurable space on its parabolic course, suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky... It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.

“...as soon as he put his arm around her slender, mobile, quivering waist, and she began to move so close to him and smile so close to him, the wine of her loveliness went to his head: he felt himself revived and rejuvenated..”

“My tongue is my enemy.”