299 Quotes by Amor Towles

It goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.

It was the symphony or silence.

Each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city’s architectural, cultural and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing eachother in the thoroughfares few and unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmas time in Vienna, April in Paris and autumn in New York.

True, it would not be a new venture for him. But need it be? Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before?

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.

Does a banquet really need an asparagus server?” “Does an orchestra need a bassoon?

Perhaps it is inescapable that when our lives are in flux, despite the comfort of our beds, we are bound to keep ourselves awake grappling with anxieties – no matter how great or small, how real or imagined.

With so little to do and all the time in the world to do it, the Count’s peace of mind continued to be threatened by a sense of ennui – that dreaded mire of the human emotions.

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.