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Anna Karenina Quotes

25 of the best book quotes from Anna Karenina
01
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“I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
Leo Tolstoy
author
Anna Karenina
book
love
concept
02
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“It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.”
love
women
concepts
03
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“She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened or what was going to happen and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.”
04
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“It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
05
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“No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers – strangers forever!” She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her. “And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!.... How I loved him! And now don’t I love him? Don’t I love him more than before? The most horrible thing is,” she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.”
Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya (Dolly)
character
06
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“He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the torture of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving, feigning, and continually thinking of others, when the passion that united them was so intense that they were both oblivious of everything else but their love.”
07
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“Love those that hate you, but to love those one hates is impossible.”
08
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“Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
09
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“The place where she stood seemed to him a holy shrine, unapproachable, and there was one moment when he was almost retreating, so overwhelmed was he with terror. He had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind himself that people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he too might come there to skate. He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.”
10
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“The French fashion — of the parents arranging their children’s future — was not accepted; it was condemned. The English fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not accepted, and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion of matchmaking by the officer of intermediate persons was for some reason considered disgraceful; it was ridiculed by everyone, and by the princess herself. But how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them, no one knew.”
11
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“I think...if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”
12
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“His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned.”
13
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“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
14
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“If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.”
15
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“Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed.”
16
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“I’ll be bad; but anyway not a liar, a cheat.”
17
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“Love. Why I don’t like the word is that it means too much to me, far more than you can understand,” and she glanced into his face. ‘Au revoir!‘”
18
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″‘You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,’ he was saying; ‘but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so ... yes, love!...‘”
19
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“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
20
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“Anything’s better than lying and deceit.”
21
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“All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class--all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class--she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.”
22
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“They haven’t an idea of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness--no life at all.”
23
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″‘If you love me, as you say,’ she whispered, ‘do so that I may be at peace.‘”
24
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“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
25
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“Every heart has its own skeletons.”

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