Best 68 quotes of Amor Towles on MyQuotes

Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don't mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I'm talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine. Walking through an unsullied hour with an unsullied heart

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion....if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.

Be careful when choosing what you're proud of--because the world has every intention of using it against you

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.

Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn't very polite.' 'I'm sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn't seem to stop the rest of us.

For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.

For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.

If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.

I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

I suppose we don't rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment-a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

Learning dance steps was the sorry Saturday night pursuit of every boardinghouse girl in America.

Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.

Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?

Slurring is the cursive of speech.

That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weather wane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.

That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.

A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I--like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs.

But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one--at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.

But for me,dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was the civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity into the ether of the finely superfluous? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits

But of course, the Count also wept for himself. For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sofia - that extraordinary blessing that had struck him from the blue - when Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich died, there went the last of those who had known him as a younger man.

But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, it’s climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration--and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.

Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest.

--Do you think he'll be careful, Michael? --Being that it's a war, ma'am, that would sort of defeat the purpose. --Yes. I suppose it would.

Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleagured in the middle of the night.

Ever since [that day], a small uncertainty had buzzed between us.It was a sense of chemistry that had been a little elusive, a little imprecise, until now.

For all the varied concerns attendant to the raising of a child—over schoolwork, dress, and manners—in the end, a parent’s responsibility could not be more simple: To bring a child safely into adulthood so that she could have a chance to experience a life of purpose and, God willing, contentment.

For however decisive the Bolsheviks’ victory had been over the privileged classes on behalf of the Proletariat, they would be having banquets soon enough.

For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.

For it is the role of the parent to express his concerns and then take three steps back. Not one, mind you, not two, but three. Or maybe four(But by no means five).

For wasn't it just a matter of time before we crossed each other's path? Despite all the hoopla, wasn't Manhattan just ten miles long and a mile or two wide? So in the days that followed, I kept an eye out, I looked for his figure on the street corners and in the coffee shops. I imagined coming home and having him emerge once more from the doorway across the street. But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, this sense of anticipation waned, and slowly but surely, I stopped expecting to see him in a crowd.

For wasn't it just a matter of time before we crossed each other's path? Despite all the hoopla, wasn't Manhattan just ten miles long and a mile or two wide? So in the days that followed, I kept en eye out, I looked for his figure on the street corners and in the coffee shops. I imagined coming home and having him emerge once more from the doorway across the street. But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, this sense of anticipation waned, and slowly but surely, I stopped expecting to see him in a crowd.

For what was civilization but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)?

Friends, Casper observed, are the envy of the angels.

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair.

How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy. Maybe it was to hearken back to their seventeenth-century New England bootstraps--the manual trades that had made them stalwart and humble and virtuous in the eyes of their Lord. Or maybe it was just a way of politely understating their predestination to having it all.

If one has been absent for decades from a place that one once held dear, the wise would generally counsel that one should never return there again. History abounds with sobering examples: After decades of wandering the seas and overcoming all manner of deadly hazards, Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca, only to leave it again a few years later. Robinson Crusoe, having made it back to England after years of isolation, shortly thereafter set sail for that very same island from which he had so fervently prayed for deliverance. Why after so many years of longing for home did these sojourners abandon it so shortly upon their return? It is hard to say. But perhaps for those returning after a long absence, the combination of heartfelt sentiments and the ruthless influence of time can only spawn disappointments. The landscape is not as beautiful as one remembered it. The local cider is not as sweet. Quaint buildings have been restored beyond recognition, while fine old traditions have lapsed to make way for mystifying new entertainments. And having imagined at one time that one resided at the very center of this little universe, one is barely recognized, if recognized at all. Thus do the wise counsel that one should steer far and wide of the old homestead. But no counsel, however well grounded in history, is suitable for all. Like bottles of wine, two men will differ radically from each other for being born a year apart or on neighboring hills. By way of example, as this traveler stood before the ruins of his old home, he was not overcome by shock, indignation, or despair. Rather, he exhibited the same smile, at once wistful and serene, that he had exhibited upon seeing the overgrown road. For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.

I had the house salad - a terrific concoction of iceberg greens, cold blue cheese and warm red bacon. If I were a county, I would have made it my flag.

In moments of high emotion, whether they're triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment, if the next thing you are going to say makes you feel better, than it's probably the wrong thing to say.

In the Age of Bronze, when a canny few discovered the science of metallurgy, how long did it take for them to fashion coins, crowns, and swords? That unholy trinity to which the common man was enslaved for the next one thousand years.

It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time--by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still? In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions--we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made shape our lives for decades to come.

Mark my words, my friend: We have not burned Moscow to the ground for the last time

Mishka would pine for Katerina the rest of his life! Never again would he walk Nevsky Prospekt, however they chose to rename it, without feeling an unbearable sense of loss. And that is just how it should be. That sense of loss is exactly what we must anticipate, prepare for, and cherish to the last of our days; for it is only our heartbreak that finally refutes all that is ephemeral in love.

Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

Now, when a man has been underestimated by a friend, he has some cause for taking offense—since it is our friends who should overestimate our capacities.

Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress—any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have lingered for decades. And this must be especially so, when those with newfound power are men who distrust any form of hesitation or nuance, and who prize self-assurance above all.