As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted the larger world. Like Edith, Theodore filled pages of his letters with talk of authors and their creations. He had carried Anna Karenina with him during this trip west and told Corinne that he "read it through with very great interest." Although he considered Tolstoy "a great writer," he found his work deeply unsettling. "Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history-a fact which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone, together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers.
( Doris Kearns Goodwin )
[ The Bully Pulpit: Theodore ]
www.QuoteSweet.com