Married to Tolstoy Quotes

“Above all, she could not bear that in sinister complete change in his outlook which was to make him describe beauty as coming, not from God, but from the devil.”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“The wife of a great man forever stands on trial. No verdict is final.”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“The unhappy lonely wives of great men are the wives of whom posterity makes Xantippes
__From the diary of Countess Tolstoy”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“At times she was sympathetic, at others derisive, as when she called Tolstoy's struggles to live in artificial poverty ‘playing at Robinson Crusoe.’ The defects of her virtues grew more pronounced with the years. The spontaneous candour of her girlhood had been one of her principal attractions to Tolstoy, who thought sincerity the most valuable of all qualities; but as she grew older, she gender to express her opinions too vehemently, or bitterly, as in the written complaint: ‘‘When Leo turned to Christianity, the martyrdom was mine, not his.”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy

“Why is Leo set on making me feel guilty?’ she wrote. ‘He seems determined to make me miserable by forcing me to think of nothing but poverty, illness and misery – actually to look at it; and he expects the wretched children to do the same. Is there any need for healthy human beings deliberately to dwell on suffering – to seek it out? Must one keep on going to hospitals to listen to the groans of the dying? If you come across a sick fellow creature, by all means take pity on him, do all you possibly can go help him. But need you search him out?”
― Cynthia Asquith, Married to Tolstoy