Amor Towles
By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.Collection: Nature
In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.Collection: Architecture
If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us...then there wouldn't be so much fuss about love in the first place.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Decision
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.Collection: Book
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 heartCollection: Mean
For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.Collection: Laughing
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.Collection: Feel Better
I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.Collection: Mean
If you could relive one year in your life, which one would it be? [...] The upcoming one.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Civilization
Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Blue
Slurring is the cursive of speech.Collection: Speech
Be careful when choosing what you're proud of--because the world has every intention of using it against youCollection: World
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.Collection: Talking
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.Collection: Wind
Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?Collection: Nice
If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.Collection: Gun
That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weather wane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Talking
Learning dance steps was the sorry Saturday night pursuit of every boardinghouse girl in America.Collection: Girl
That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.Collection: Running