Quotes · verified word for word in the text
Anna Karenina quotes
14 quotes from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #1399 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 4
“Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don’t fret for what I haven’t,” said Levin, thinking of Kitty.
— Levin · Chapter 14
Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife’s loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.
You are one of those delightful women in whose company it’s sweet to be silent as well as to talk.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 18
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don’t love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so.”
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 24
He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
— Stepan Arkadyevitch · Chapter 11
And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.
“I think ... of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
— Anna · Chapter 7
Spring is the time of plans and projects.
Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it,” he said, in the word we linking himself with Anna.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 21
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,” he thought.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 21
Something magical has happened to me, like a dream, when you’re frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more. I have waked up.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 18