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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
I did not hear a single phrase more of this music that I loved, my heart was hammering so fiercely.
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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
I took my leave, and as I did so I felt like a person healed after a long illness. That I had just committed myself afresh, and now permanently, to another being ,one who suffered terribly, one of life’s outcasts, suddenly seemed no longer a sacrifice on my part. No, it is not the healthy, the secure, the proud, happy people on this earth whom we should love – they have no need of it! Love is, for them, no more than a homage, an entitlement, a duty owed to them, and they take it presumptously and indifferently. To them, the devotion of another person is nothing more than an adornment, something to wear in the hair, a bracelet for the arm – not the entirety of life’s means and bliss. Only those whom Fate has laid low, those who suffer, the disadvantaged, the wretched and insecure, the unlovely, the humbled among us, only they can be truly blessed by love. Dedicate your life to them, you truly restore what life has taken from them. They alone know how to live, and how to be loved as we truly should love and be loved – in gratitude, in humility.
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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
‘Pity – yes, that’s fine! But there are in fact two kinds of pity. One, the feeble and sentimental kind, is really no more than the heart’s impatience to free itself as quickly as possible from emotional discomfort when faced with another’s misfortune; it is the sort of pity which is not at all genuine sympathy – “shared feeling” – but merely an instinctive defence of one’s own soul against the other person’s pain. Then there is the other kind, which is the only one that counts unsentimental yet constructive, knowing its own mind, fully resolved to endure everything patiently, compassionately, along with that other person, right to the limit of its strength, and even beyond that limit. It is only when you see things through to the end, the real, bitter end, and you have great, great patience, that you can genuinely help others – only when genuine self-sacrifice is involved, only then!’
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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
I remained slightly uneasy over Edith, sitting opposite her in the coach. She was still trembling through her whole body; some powerful emotion seemed to be weighing on her. And then suddenly she broke out into a violent sobbing. But these were sobs of happiness. She was weeping and laughing almost at the same moment; without a doubt the crafty gypsy woman had foretold her speedy return to health, and probably also a good deal more than that.
But as she sobbed she protested petulantly, ‘Oh, leave me alone, won’t you?’ In her very outburst of agitation she seemed to be taking some quite new and extraordinary pleasure. ‘Leave me, leave me alone!’ she kept on saying. ‘Of course I know she’s just a fraud, that old woman, of course I know that. But can’t one be silly, just for once? Just for once, why not have myself properly fooled?’
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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
Envy is never meaner than in one who, being himself of humble status, sees another underling suddenly swept aloft, as if carried on an angel’s wings, out of the drudgery they both know. Petty-minded creatures will sooner forgive a prince the most prodigious wealth than countenance the tiniest degree of betterment in the life of a fellow menial.
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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
I really felt like singing aloud, like doing something insane in this elated state I was in; it is always when you see that you actually count for something in other people’s eyes that you begin to feel some sense, some purpose, in your own existence.
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IMPATIENCE OF THE HEART - Stefan Zweig
The mere speck of dust that is man today no longer ranked as an agent of free will.
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THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH - Leo Tolstoy
And all at once it became clear to him that what had tortured him and would not leave him was suddenly dropping away all at once on both sides and on ten sides and on all sides. He was sorry for them, must act so that they might not suffer. Set them free and be free himself of those agonies. ‘How right and how simple!’ he thought. ‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘Where’s it gone? Eh, where are you, pain?’
He began to watch for it.
‘Yes, here it is. Well what of it, let the pain be.’
‘And death. Where is it?’
He looked for his old accustomed terror of death, and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no terror, because death was not either.
In the place of death there was light.
‘So this is it!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!’
To him all this passed in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant suffered no change after. For those present his agony lasted another two hours. There was a rattle in his throat, a twitching in his wasted body. Then the rattle and the gasping came at longer and longer intervals.
‘It is over!’ someone said over him.
He caught those words and repeated them in his soul.
‘Death is over,’ he said to himself. ‘It’s no more.’
He drew in a breath, stopped midway in the breath, stretched and died.
#the death of ivan ilyich#leo tolstoy#tolstoy#book extract#book quote#book quotes#books#book#quote#quotes
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THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH - Leo Tolstoy
Apart from this deception, or in consequence of it, what made the greatest misery for Ivan Ilyich was that no one felt for him as he would have liked them to feel for him. At certain moments, after prolonged suffering, Ivan Ilyich, ashamed as he would have been to own it, longed more than anything for someone to feel sorry for him, as for a sick child. He longed to be petted, kissed, and wept over, as children are petted and comforted. He knew that he was an important member of the law-courts, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore it was impossible. But still he longed for it. And in his relations with Gerasim there was something approaching to that. And that was why being with Gerasim was a comfort to him. Ivan Ilyich longs to weep, longs to be petted and wept over, and then there comes in a colleague, Shebek; and instead of weeping and being petted, Ivan Ilyich puts on his serious, severe, earnest face, and from mere inertia gives his views on the effect of the last decision in the Court of Appeal, and obstinately insists upon them. This falsity around him and within him did more than anything to poison Ivan Ilyich’s last days.
#the death of ivan ilyich#leo tolstoy#tolstoy#book extract#book quote#book quotes#books#book#quote#quotes
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THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH - Leo Tolstoy
And to replace this thought he called up other thoughts, one after another, in the hope of finding support in them. He tried to get back into former trains of thought, which in old days had screened off the thought of death. But, strange to say, all that had in old days covered up, obliterated the sense of death, could not now produce the same effect. Latterly, Ivan Ilyich spent the greater part of his time in these efforts to restore his old trains of thought which had shut off death. At one time he would say to himself, ‘I’ll put myself into my official work; why, I used to live in it.’ And he would go to the law-courts, banishing every doubt. He would enter into conversation with his colleagues, and would sit carelessly, as his old habit was, scanning the crowd below dreamily, and with both his wasted hands he would lean on the arms of the oak armchair just as he always did; and bending over to a colleague, pass the papers to him and whisper to him, then suddenly dropping his eyes and sitting up straight, he would pronounce the familiar words that opened the proceedings. But suddenly in the middle, the pain in his side, utterly regardless of the stage he had reached in his conduct of the case, began it work. It riveted Ivan Ilyich’s attention. He drove away the thought of it, but it still did its work, and then It came and stood confronting him and looked at him, and he felt turned to stone, and the light died away in his eyes, and he began to ask himself again, ‘Can it be that It is the only truth?’
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THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH - Leo Tolstoy
So they lived. And everything went on in this way without change, and everything was very nice.
#the death of ivan ilyich#leo tolstoy#tolstoy#book extract#book quote#book quotes#books#book#quote#quotes
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FAMILY HAPPINESS - Leo Tolstoy
‘You reasoned, you reasoned much,’ said I. ‘You loved little.’
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FAMILY HAPPINESS - Leo Tolstoy
‘And is there nothing you wish for?’ I asked.
‘Nothing impossible,’ he answered, guessing my feeling. ‘See, you’re getting your head wet,’ he added, once more passing his hand over my hair as though caressing a child; ‘you envy the leaves and the grass for the rain wetting them; you would like to be the grass and the leaves and the rain; while I merely rejoice in them, as I do in everything in the world that is good and young and happy.’
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FAMILY HAPPINESS - Leo Tolstoy
One day I was not well, I stopped at home alone; Katya and Sonya had driven with him to Nikolskoe to look at the new building there. The table was set for tea, I went down, and while waiting for them sat down to the piano. I opened the sonata quasi una fantasia, and began playing it. No one was within sight or hearing, the windows were open into the garden, and the familiar, majestically melancholy music resounded in the room. I finished the first part, and quite unconsciously, from old habit, looked round to the corner in which he used once to sit listening to me. But he was not there. The chair, long unmoved, stood in the corner; and past the open window I could see the lilac in the bright sunset, and the evening freshness flowed into the room. I leaned my elbows on the piano, hid my face in both hands, and pondered. I sat a long while so, with a heartache recalling all the past that could not come back, and timidly considering what was to come. But before me it seemed that there was nothing; it seemed that I desired nothing and hoped for nothing. ‘Can I have lived out my life?’ I thought with horror; and lifting my head, I tried to forget myself, to escape thinking by playing again, and began again the same andante. ‘My God!’ I thought, ‘forgive me, if I am in fault, or restore me what was once so good in my soul, and teach me what to do, how to live now!’ The sounds of wheels over the grass and at the entrance reached me, and familiar steps could be heard stepping cautiously in the verandah and ceasing. But the old feeling did not stir in response to those familiar footsteps. When I had finished, I heard the steps behind me, and a hand was laid on my shoulder.
‘What a clever girl you are to play that sonata!’ he said.
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FAMILY HAPPINESS - Leo Tolstoy
And in the room all was still; only Katya breathed drowsily and evenly, the clock ticked by her side, and I turned from side to side, murmuring words, or crossing myself and kissing the cross on my neck. The doors were closed, the shutters were on the windows, some fly or gnat buzzed, stirring continually in the same spot. And I would have liked never to leave this room; I did not want morning to come, I did not want the spiritual atmosphere that enfolded me ever to be dissipated. It seemed to me that my dreams, my thoughts, and prayers were live things, living with me in the darkness, flying about my bed, hovering over me. And every idea was his idea, and every feeling was his feeling. I did not know then that this was love – I thought that this might always be so, that of itself, for no other end, this feeling had come to me.
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FAMILY HAPPINESS - Leo Tolstoy
In the hall where we stood seeing him off he made haste to put on his fur coat, and again his eyes looked past me. ‘He needn’t trouble himself,’ I thought. ‘Does he suppose I’m so pleased at his looking at me? He’s a nice man, very nice, but… that’s all.’
That evening, however, Katya and I sat up talking a long while, not about him, but of how we would spend the summer, and where and how we would stay for the winter. The terrible question – What for? - did not occur to me. It seemed to me very simple and evident that we must live to be happy, and a great deal of happiness seemed lying before me in the future. It seemed as though our dark old house a Pokrovskoe were suddenly full of life and light.
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A PAIR OF BLUE EYES - Thomas Hardy
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length. Their glance, but a moment chronologically, was a season in their history.
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