War and Peace

I finally did it. I read War and Peace! It was truly an incredible book. I'm still kind of thinking about it a week after I finished it, which is always a sign of a good book.

Here are some parts that I liked for one reason or another. Some I though were funny and some really resonated with me.

[after Prince Andrey gets shot] "'What's this? am I falling? my legs are giving way under me,' he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the French soldiers with the artilleryman was ending... But he saw nothing of all that. Above him there was nothing but the sky -- the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds creeping quietly over it. 'How quietly, peacefully, and triumphantly, and not like us running, shouting, and fighting, not like the Frenchman and artilleryman dragging the mop from one another with frightened and frantic faces, how differently are those clouds creeping over that lofty, limitless sky. How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! all is vanity, all is a cheat, except that inifite sky. There is nothing, nothing but that. But even that is not, there is nothing but peace and stillness. And thank God!..."

"Better quarters could have been found, but Marshal Davoust was one of these people who purposely put themselves into the most dismal conditions of life in order to have a right to be dismal. For the same reason they always persist in being busy and in a hurry. 'How could one be thinking of the bright side of life when, as you see, I am sitting on a tub in a dirty barn, hard at work?' was what his face expressed."

"[Pierre] was conscious now of a glad sense that all that constitutes the happiness of life, comfort, wealth, even life itself, were all dust and ashes, which it was a joy to fling away in comparison with something else.... What that something else was Pierre could not have said, and indeed he did not seek to get a clear idea, for whose sake and for what object he found such peculiar joy in sacrificing all."

"[Natasha] was gay too, because she needed some one to adore her (the adoration of others was like the grease on the wheels, without which her mechanism never worked quite smoothly), and Petya did adore her."

"All Pierre's dreams now turned to the time when he would be free. And yet, in all his later life, Pierre thought and spoke with enthusiasm of that month of imprisonment, of those intense and joyful sensations that could never be recalled, and above all of that full, spiritual peace, of that perfect, inward freedom, of which he had only experienced at that period."

"He had learned that there is nothing terrible to be dreaded in the world. He had learned that just as there is no position in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so too there is no position in which he need be unhappy and in bondage. He had found out that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that that limit is very soon reached; that the man who suffered from a crumpled petal in his bed of roses, suffered just as much as he suffered now, sleeping on the bare, damp earth."

"And the whole world has gone on for fifty years repeating: Sublime! Grand! Napoleon the Great. And it never enter any one's head that to admit a greatness, immeasurable by the rule of right and wrong, is but to accept one's own nothingness and immeasurable littleness. For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth."

"The doctor, who was attending Pierre, and came to see him every day, though he thought it his duty as a doctor to pose a a man every minute of whose time is of value for suffering humanity, used to sit on with him for hours together."

"What had worried him in old days, what he had always been seeking to solve, the question of the object of life, did not exist for him now. That seeking for an object in life was over for him now; and it was not fortuitously or temporarily that it was over. He felt that there was no such object, and could not be. And it was just the absence of an object that gave him that complete and joyful sense of freedom that at this time made his happiness. He could seek no object in life now, because now he had faith -- not faith in any sort of principles, or words, or ideas, but faith in a living, ever-palpable God."