Sophia Tolstaya

"Those last days of my girlhood were extraordinarily intense, lit by a dazzling brightness and a sudden awakening of the soul. I have had this same sense of spiritual elation on two other occasions in …"

"My diary again. It's sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married. I used to write when I felt depressed €”– now I suppose it's for the same reason. Relations with my husband have …"

"My jealousy is a congenital illness, or maybe in loving him I have nothing else to love."

"I am so tired of all this intellectualising – attacking this and denying that, and searching not for truth, for that would be good, but for anything startling, shocking or original, anything that hasn…"

"Everyone wants love, but there are so few who can give it. Or else you offer it passionately, selflessly, and it's rejected, your love is not wanted, it's a burden."

"Lev Nikolaevich has described our wedding beautifully in his account of Levin and Kitty's wedding in his novel Anna Karenina. Not only did he paint a brilliantly imaginative picture of the ceremony, h…"

"If I could kill him and create a new person exactly the same as he is now, I would do so happily."

"L.N. said that before one spoke about women's inequality and oppression one should first talk about people's inequality in general. And he said that if a woman raises this question herself, there is s…"