299 Quotes by Amor Towles

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.

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.

Sitting in the jazz bars or the supper clubs, the worn and the well-to-do would be nodding their heads in smiling acknowledgement that the Belarusian immigrant had it right: that somehow, despite the coming of winter, autumn in New York promises an effervescent romance which makes one look to the Manhattan skyline with fresh eyes and feel: It's good to live it again.

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)?

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 human emotions.

—Bucky dear, his wife warned, you’re slurring your words. —Slurring is the cursive of speech, I observed.

I sutured split infinitives and hoisted dangling modifiers and wore out the seam of my best flannel skirt.

At the center of all that is Russia - of its culture, its psychology, and, perhaps, its destiny - stands the Kremlin, a walled fortress a thousand years old and four hundred miles from the sea. Physically speaking, its walls are no longer high enough to fend off attack, and yet, they still cast a shadow across the entire country.

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.