Matt’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

”It has to be so...”

“And further beyond these forests and fields could be seen the bright, wavering, endless distance calling one to itself. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. ‘And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!’ thought Pierre. ‘And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!’ He smiled and went to his comrades to lie down and sleep.”

“To love everything, everybody, always to sacrifice oneself for love, meant to love no one, meant not to love this earthly life. And the more imbued he was with this principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that dreadful barrier which, without love, stands between life and death.”

“Loving with a human love, one can pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, nothing can destroy it. It is the essence of the soul.”

“Compassion, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies—yes, that love which God preached on earth, and which I didn’t understand; that’s why I was sorry about life, that’s what’s still left for me, if I was to live.”

“He knew that tomorrow’s battle was to be the most dreadful of all he had taken part in, and the possibility of death presented itself to him, for the first time in his life, with no relation to the everyday, with no considerations of how it would affect others, but only in relation to himself, to his soul, vividly, almost with certainty, simply, and terribly.”

“Ashamed as she was to admit to herself that she had fallen in love first with a man who, perhaps, would never love her, she comforted herself with the thought that no one would ever know of it, and that she would not be to blame if, to the end of her life, without speaking of it to anyone, she should love the one she loved for the first and last time.”

“The higher the sun rose, the higher rose the cloud of dust, and through this fine, hot dust one could look with the naked eye at the sun, not covered by clouds. The sun looked like a large crimson ball. There was no wind, and the men suffocated in this unstirring atmosphere. When they came to a village, they all rushed to the wells. They fought over the water and drank it down to the mud.”

“...but she never once laughed so that tears were not heard behind her laughter. She could not sing. As soon as she began to laugh or tried to sing when she was by herself, tears choked her: tears of remorse, tears of remembrance of that irretrievable time of purity, tears of vexation that just so, for nothing, she had ruined her young life, which might have been so happy.”

“All people seemed so pitiful, so poor in comparison with the feeling of tenderness and love he experienced, in comparison with that softened, grateful glance she had given him at the last moment through her tears.”