Anna Karenina

This month's book for TJHirst's blogging bookgroup was A-MA-ZING!  Anna Karenina!  I loved it when I read it years back and I loved it again and even more when I read it this month.  I have a small confession to make, I haven't quite finished it yet.  I've been out of town for a week and a half this month and between that and life, my reading time has been unfortunately cut short!

I decided for my post, I would put some of my favorite quotes and life lessons from the book.  Tolstoy is an incredible author!  He's able to put real life into fiction which is rarely found these days (Did anyone notice the lack of plausability in Twilight and it's sequels?  Pure escapeism, if I can quote my sister-in-law). 

I'm a firm believer in learning from other's mistakes.  That way I don't have to make them myself! :)  I know that just reading about a character's bad choices doesn't guarantee that I won't make the same mistake, but when the consequences and emotions are written out so well (as in Anna Karenina), it makes it easier for me to learn.

Friends
One of the first life lessons that I noticed in this book was how much an effect your choice of friends has on your life.  They always say that in church, and I shrugged it off.  I figured that I could be friends with anybody, no matter their morals, and I could be unaffected by their choices.

In Anna Karenina, through Anna's choices, it is shown that friends do have an effect.  You can't blame all of a person's bad or good choices on their friends.  Everyone has free agency, but it is easier to choose things your friends do or are comfortable with than not.  Peer pressure?  Just before Anna and Vronsky seriously began their relationship, Anna switched from spending time with the older, more respectable crowd (who frankly, seemed a bit boring), to the younger more live-your-life-freely crowd (who seemed a bit too loose, wasn't there an "inbetween crowd"?).  It's my opinion that it would have been much more difficult for Anna to make the choice to commit adultry if she continued to hang with the older crowd, but she went the easy route with the group that would accept her bad choices.

The Religious Education of Children
"'You are about to enter into matrimony and God may reward your union with children, is that not so?  Well then,  What sort of education can you give your little ones if you do not conquer in yourself the temptation of the devil who is leading you into unbelief?' he said with gentle reproach 'If you love your children, then you, as a god father, will desire not only riches, luxury, and honors for them, but you will also desire their salvation, their spiritual advancement in the light of truth." pg. 445
-the Priest talking to Levin before his marriage

Real Love
"Left alone and thinking over the remarks of those bachelors, Levin asked himself again whether there was in his heart any of that feeling of regret for his freedom they had been talking about.  He smiled at the question.  'Freedom?  Who wants freedom?  Happiness consists only in loving and desiring, in wishing her wishes, thinking her thoughts, which means having no freedom whatever--that is happiness!'" pg. 448
-Levin thinking about his marriage to Kitty

Wickedness Never Was Happiness
"Vronsky, meanwhile, although what he had so long desired had come to pass, was not altogether happy.  He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected.  This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realizeation of their desires." pg. 468
-Vronsky thinking after consumating his adulterous relationship with Anna.

How Marriage Really Is
" Levin had been married three months.  He was happy, but not in the way he had expected.  At every step he found that he was disappointed in his former dreams and discovered new and unexpected enchantments.  Levin was happy, but having embarked on married life, he saw at every step that it was not at all what he had imagined.  At every step he experienced what a man experiences when, after admiring the smooth, happy motion of a boat on a lake, he finds himself sitting in it himself.  He found that it was not enough to sit quietly without rocking the boat, that he had constantly to consider what to do next, that not for a moment must he forget what course to steer or that there was water under his feet, that he had to row, much as it hurt his unaccustomed hands, that it was pleasant enough to look at it from the shore, but very hard, though very delightful, so sail it." pg. 482
-Levin climatizing to his marriage. (My personal favorite quote.  What a great metaphor!)

Why Premarital Relations Aren't so Hot in the Long Run
"The poise of her head on her beautiful, broad shoulders and the restrained excitement and radiance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of what she had looked like when he ahd seen her at the ball in Moscow.  But now he was affected by this beauty in quite a different way.  There was nothing mysterious now in his feeling for her, and for the reason her beauty, though it attracted him more powerfully than ever, also offended him." pg. 548
-How Vronsky's feelings for Anna have changed

Thank you TJHirst for this great book choice!  I LOVED IT!!!