WAR AND PEACE

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

449

because he understood something else that the living did not and could not understand, and that entirely absorbed him.

452

In those hours of solitary suffering and half delirium that he spent afterwards, the more he passed in thought into the new element of eternal love, revealed to him, the further he travelled from earthly life. To love everything, every one, to sacrifise self always for love, meant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life, the more completely he annihilated that fearful barrier between life and death.

453

when love for one woman stole unseen into his heart, and bound him again to life.

... It was the last mortal struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the sudden consciousness that life, in the shape of his love for Natasha, was still precious to him, and the last and vanquished onslaught of terror before the unknown. 

454

"Natasha I love you too much! More than everything in the world!

455

Love hinders death. Love is life. All , all that I understand, I understand only because I love. All is, all exists only because I love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God, and dying means from a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love

455-56-57

... He dreamed...by degrees all these people began to disappear, and the one thing that was left was the question of closing the door...Everything depended on whether he were on time to shut it or not...And    an agonizing terror came upon him; Behind the door stood it...His last supernatural efforts were in vain...It comes in, and it is death. He died.

But at that instant he recollected that he was asleep; he made an effort and waked up. "Yes, death is an awakening," flashed with sudden light into his soul, and the veil that had till then hidden the unknown was lifted before his spiritual vision. He felt, as it were, set free from some force that held him in bondage, and was aware of that strange lightness of being that had not left him since.

that day there began for Andrey an awakening from life...he was no more...the body, deserted by the spirit, passed through its last struggles