"Feelings of wounded self-regard (on both sides) soon knew no bounds, and daily life at Yasnaya Polyana was approached with a mixture of attraction and repulsion that often excited thoughts of murder or suicide. Both Sonya and Tolstoy became obsessed to the point of dementia with the conviction that, at the hands of the other, each had been cheated of a destiny that would signify. Neither could have understood in advance of the marriage the depth of emotional ambition that motivated them, much less that it was precisely because that ambition was destined to be thwarted that each would be bound permanently, one to the other. It was the stuff upon which Sigmund Freud was to build an intellectual empire."

"The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves."