299 Quotes by Amor Towles

The Count commenced to cough into his napkin, as he had determined long ago that this was the most effective means of removing wine from his windpipe.

And as she talked, the Count had to acknowledge once again the virtues of withholding judgment.

The only difference between everybody and nobody is all the shoes.

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.

Where her mother was prone to express her impatience with the slightest of the world’s imperfections, Sofia seemed to presume that if the earth spun awry upon occasion, it was generally a well-intentioned planet.

Well, my boys,” he said, giving them a good scratching behind the ears, “where do you hail from?” “Arf,” replied the dogs. “Ah,” said the Count. “How lovely.

As we age, we are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade. We are familiar with the songs our grandparents favored, after all, even though we never danced to them ourselves. At festive holidays, the recipes we pull from the drawer are routinely decades old, and in some cases even written in the hand of a relative long since dead.

As the sign over the cash register made clear, the three ways you could get your coffee at Chester’s were sweetened, unsweetened, and somewhere else.

But having mastered the art of descending the stairs to a gathering of admirers, she had yet to master the art of ascending the stairs alone. Perhaps no one has.