Kissing Tolstoy Quotes

“If you know who you are, rejection matters very little. It says more about the small-mindedness of the person who is doing the rejecting than it does about you.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Come self-sufficient. Come powerful. Or come weak and uncertain. Just come to me. And stay. Trust that you are precisely the right piece, because you are the missing piece—in my life and of my heart.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Yes, I felt shabby and small, but that’s okay. I was shabby and small. There’s nothing wrong with being shabby and small. Hobbits are shabby and small and look how badass they are.

Plus, second breakfasts for the win.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Pride is just another word for insecurity and fear—again, having no strong sense of self or worth. If pride is the driving force behind your decisions, then your life is going to suck.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“I love to read, but I’m not a writer. I love philosophy, but I’m not a philosopher. I love art, but I can’t paint, I can’t draw or sculpt. I love movies and the theater, but I’m a terrible actor. Therefore, I’m a patron”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“You infect me, body and soul, with primitive thoughts of claiming and conquering. I do not know who I am when I touch you. I am no longer civilized, I am blood and heat and lust. I barely recognize myself.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Apparently, hope is for hipsters because hope failed me.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Never try to be other than you are. You are perfection, just as you are.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Breathless and Wretched, the new fragrance by Calvin Klein.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Russia used to be great, a nation of philosophers, brilliant thinkers, artists, and scientists. Not anymore. It hasn’t been great for a long time, not since Stalin purged the thinking class. Contrary to popular belief, he didn’t murder the bourgeoisie, he murdered anyone with talent. Do you know what that does to a society? I find it’s difficult to be proud of my heritage, of a culture I now consider mediocre at best, monstrous at worst. Russia is irrevocably crippled, stained by its totalitarianism—to which it still subscribes, like sheep—and rivers flow, the sky weeps with the blood of what once made it great.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“this post-modern individualism is harmful, that we—Western society—have become lazy in our dependencies and relationships. To say, ‘Don’t attempt to love another until you know what it is to love yourself,’ is imbecilic. We, humans, must be loved first to know how to love in return. This is why we are given families, ideally parents, who will love us, teach us that we are worthwhile, worthy of love and respect, provide a mirror, a reflection of our worth. We must know what love is, what it looks like, in order to give it to another.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Sorry. That was melodramatic. Let me clarify: I didn’t want to die, I wanted to be unconscious.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Pride is just another word for insecurity and fear”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“We fit together like custom pieces from a two person puzzle. And therefore, you are exactly my perfect kind of nice.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Come back." It was a demand.
"No."
"You want to be there. You love it."
"How would you know? You never look at me." I picked up my not-Shirley Temple and took a sip. It was strong, but it also tasted like bravery.
"I see you, Anna." His voice lowered an octave, as though he were endeavoring to control his temper; his hand on the bar inched closer. "It's impossible not to see you.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Come as you are, Anna.”
I felt the hesitation in her, the contradiction on the tip of her tongue.
“Come self-sufficient. Come powerful. Or come weak and uncertain. Just come to me. And stay. Trust that you are precisely the right piece, because you are the missing piece—in my life and of my heart.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Perhaps others, cut from different cloth, could pick and choose their conquests. Live their lives as patient fishermen, searching with intermittent success within a vast sea full of alluring fish. If the circumstances of one catch proved inconvenient, these fictional fishermen need only toss back the lure and wait for another. Not so for me. I vehemently rejected this belief that our souls could thrive with any number of partners, a good-enough rodstvennaya dusha. One. One half of one soul. It is popular to say that one must find love within oneself before knowing how to love another. I rejected this statement outright, as both imbecilic in theory and impossible in practice.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“He’s tepid, not hot. If he can’t see how fucking awesome you are, if he can’t put himself on the line for you and go all in, pursue you like you deserve to be pursued, then—really—is he worth risking your heart? No. He’s not.

That makes him not your kind of nice.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“This was not the first time he’d made me feel like less. Like I wasn’t worthy of . . . him. His time. Rationally, I knew this feeling was dissonant with the truth. He’d gone out of his way to contact me, keep me in his class. As a teacher, he was doing his due diligence.

As a man, he’d kissed me for Frodo’s sake! TWICE!

And yet, as much as I recognized he was an excellent teacher, a brilliant professor, and gifted scholar, I didn’t like him—the man—very much. Because, as a man—after the kisses were over—I’d felt small and shabby.

And not in a badass Hobbit way either.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“I faced the hallway. My feet and my brain discussed the situation very, very briefly, a la:
Feet: He’s right there.
Brain: Go get him.
Feet: Rodger that, we’re on our way.
Then my feet moved me toward the open door of the office.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Something I think we forget, living in the time we do, is that generations before us didn’t have the luxury of healthy relationships”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“started reading a really good book by a new-to-me author who wrote alternate reality versions of Brontë novels and spent the next few weeks immersed in her backlist. I dated her fictional heroes instead in an unapologetic phase of serial book-boyfriend polygamy.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Wait for your Pierre, Natasha.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“I should have listened to that woman with the ring. You don’t get a ring like deathbringer without knowing what’s what.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“I dated her fictional heroes instead in an unapologetic phase of serial book-boyfriend polygamy.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“disappointment and heartache might be around the next corner. But adventure, love, joy, and happiness—the living of a rich, meaningful life—was now.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Don’t worry, the world will always need art, and artists, and literature. Just like it will always need industry and medicine. One is not more or less important than the other, at least I don’t think so. Why do we have art? To make life beautiful, to understand each other. And why do we have science? To make life easier.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“I picked up the book I’d been reading yesterday before Luca had come over, Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler and decided to marinate in this problem while I read. The novel was about a seemingly young woman with amnesia who discovers she is not what (or who) she believes herself to be. It’s an awesome book. I knew this to be true because I’d already read it several times. I especially liked how Butler illuminated self-bias, how the image we see in the mirror can lead us to believe we are one thing, when we are really another thing entirely, and—”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“I decided the color should be called “‘the gray of my discontent.”.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy

“Damn, he felt good. If Russian literature and tragic novels had taught me one thing it was this: disappointment and heartache might be around the next corner. But adventure, love, joy, and happiness—the living of a rich, meaningful life—was now.”
― Penny Reid, Kissing Tolstoy