299 Quotes by Amor Towles

Vyshinsky: And you write poetry?Rostov: I have been known to fence with a quill.

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.

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.

With over a millennia of heritage behind them, each with their own glimpse of empire and some pinnacle of human expression (a Sistine Chapel or Götterdämmerung), now they were satisfied to express their individuality through which Rogers they preferred at the Saturday matinee: Ginger or Roy or Buck. America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it's the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door.

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

Some might wonder that the two men should consider themselves to be old friends having only known each other for four years; but the tenure of friendships has never been governed by the passage of time

Thus, a good Bolshevik could sleep soundly in the knowledge that the mahogany bed he was lying on was not his; and despite the fact that his apartment was furnished with priceless antiques, he had fewer possessions than a pauper!]

The only difference between everybody and nobody is all the shoes

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.