Famous Anna Karenina Quotes

A great Russian writer once wrote that happy families are all alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Like all oft-quoted lines from bona fide geniuses, it remains a truism beyond question and yet from the moment I first read that famous first line I had my doubts. Raised, as I was, in an unhappy family that shattered apart before I was out of the single digits, I always believed the exotic and differentiated lives were lived on the other side of the dividing line between happy and not. The happy families I knew seemed to burst with possibilities; the permutations of their varied interests and eccentricities, the diversity of their achievements, the myriad of strange traditions and customs culled from their everyday happiness seemed unending.

You probably recall the famous statement at the beginning of Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy, donning there the cloak of a calm village deity and hovering over the void full of benign toleration and loving kindness, declares from on high that all happy families resemble one another, while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to Tolstoy I’m telling you that the opposite is true: Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years, each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two happinesses are alike. And in the molding of their happiness they have instilled their own suffering and humiliation. Like refining gold from ore. There is happiness in the world, Alec, even if it is more ephemeral than a dream. Indeed in your case it is beyond your reach. As a star is beyond the reach of a mole. Not “the satisfaction of approval,” not praise and advancement and conquest and domination, not submission and surrender, but the thrill of fusion. The merging of the I with another. As an oyster enfolds a foreign body and is wounded and turns it into its pearl while the warm water still surrounds and encompasses everything. You have never tasted this fusion, not once in your whole life. When the body is a musical instrument in the hands of the soul. When Other and I strike root in each other and become a single coral. And when the drip of the stalactite slowly feeds the stalagmite until the two of them become one.