Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics)

I discovered her. Charmante, a perfect Gretchen,4 and we’ve already become acquainted. The prettiest little thing, really!’

When Levin thought about what he was and what he lived for, he found no answer and fell into despair; but when he stopped asking himself about it, he seemed to know what he was and what he lived for, because he acted and lived firmly and definitely; recently he had even lived much more firmly and definitely than before.

In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled

On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature.

Kitty looked into his face, which was such a short distance from hers, and long afterwards, for several years, that look, so full of love, which she gave him then, and to which he did not respond, cut her heart with tormenting shame.

ignoble,

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it.

antediluvian

What did it mean? It meant that his life was good, but his thinking was bad.