Top 280 Amor Towles Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What is your favorite day of the year? The summer solstice. June twenty-first. The longest day of the year. It was a cute answer. But on cooler reflection, it struck me that when you’re asked your favorite day of the year, there’s a certain hubris in giving any day in June as your answer. It suggests that the particulars of your life are so terrific, and your command over your station so secure, that all you could possibly hope for is additional daylight in which to celebrate your lot.”

— Amor Towles

2. “Man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them.”

— Amor Towles

3. “Fate would not have the reputation it has, if it simply did what it seemed it would do.”

— Amor Towles

4. “No matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely.”

— Amor Towles

5. “In a state of self-pity, one may retreat from the world in which one has been blessed to live.”

— Amor Towles

6. “Ah, yes. Well. Life has been generous to me in its variety.”

— Amor Towles

7. “If you are ever in doubt, just remember that unlike adults, children want to be happy. So they still have the ability to take the greatest pleasure in the simplest things.” By.”

— Amor Towles

8. “A king fortifies himself with a castle,” observed the Count, “a gentleman with a desk.” As.”

— Amor Towles

9. “From the earliest age, we must learn to say good-bye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the station; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough.”

— Amor Towles

10. “Perhaps the Rioja.” The Rioja? Now there was a wine that would clash with the stew as Achilles clashed with Hector.”

— Amor Towles

11. “These two would have felt like old friends had they met just hours before. To some degree, this was because they were kindred spirits – finding ample evidence of common ground and cause for laughter in the midst of effortless conversation;.”

— Amor Towles

12. “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.”

— Amor Towles

13. “I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka – and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

— Amor Towles

14. “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.”

— Amor Towles

15. “They spoke of the once and the was, of the wishful and the wonderful.”

— Amor Towles

16. “By the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world.”

— Amor Towles

17. “Suddenly – I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round. Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very depths of the last days, to shine – and to hell with everything else! That is my motto – and the sun’s!”

— Amor Towles

18. “I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.”

— Amor Towles

19. “Friends, Casper observed, are the envy of the angels.”

— Amor Towles

20. “That sense of loss is exactly what we must anticipate, prepare for, and cherish to the last of our days; for it is only our heartbreak that finally refutes all that is ephemeral in love. The.”

— Amor Towles

21. “After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. 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.”

— Amor Towles

22. “For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years.”

— Amor Towles

23. “Be careful when choosing what you’re proud of – because the world has every intention of using it against you.”

— Amor Towles

24. “Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence – one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”

— Amor Towles

25. “For standing at the edge of his table was the young girl with the penchant for yellow – studying him with that unapologetic interest peculiar to children and dogs. Adding.”

— Amor Towles

26. “I guess the point I’m trying to make is that as a species we’re just no good at writing obituaries. We don’t know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now, any more than we know what his great-great-grandchildren will be having for breakfast on a Tuesday in March. Because when Fate hands something down to posterity, it does so behind its back.”

— Amor Towles

27. “Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish.”

— Amor Towles

28. “Yes, the burning of Moscow was especially Russian, my friend. Of that there can be no doubt. Because it was not a discrete event; it was the form of an event. One example plucked from a history of thousands. For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.” Perhaps.”

— Amor Towles

29. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry – one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.” With.”

— Amor Towles

30. “In fact, if Paris had not been seated next to Helen when he dined in the court of Menelaus, there never would have been a Trojan War.” A.”

— Amor Towles

31. “By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End The.”

— Amor Towles

32. “It is our friends who should overestimate our capacities. They should have an exaggerated opinion of our moral fortitude, our aesthetic sensibilities, and our intellectual scope. Why, they should practically imagine us leaping through a window in the nick of time with the works of Shakespeare in one hand and a pistol in the other!”

— Amor Towles

33. “All poetry is a call to action.”

— Amor Towles

34. “Then, like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas, he wakes one night to discover familiar constellations overhead. And when this occurs – this extraordinary realignment of the stars – the man so long out of step with his times experiences a supreme lucidity. Suddenly all that has passed comes into focus as a necessary course of events, and all that promises to unfold has the clearest rhyme and reason.”

— Amor Towles

35. “But just as important, a careful accounting of days allows the isolated to note that another year of hardship has been endured; survived; bested. Whether they have found the strength to persevere through a tireless determination or some foolhardy optimism, those 365 hatch marks stand as proof of their indomitability. For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years.”

— Amor Towles

36. “But in a period of abundance any half-wit with a spoon can please a palate. To truly test a chef’s ingenuity, one must instead look to a period of want. And what provides want better than war? In.”

— Amor Towles

37. “He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity – a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”

— Amor Towles

38. “Yes, thought the Count, the world does spin. In fact, it spins on its axis even as it revolves around the sun. And the galaxy turns as well, a wheel within a greater wheel, producing a chime of an entirely different nature than that of a tiny hammer in a clock. And when that celestial chime sounds, perhaps a mirror will suddenly serve its truer purpose – revealing to a man not who he imagines himself to be, but who he has become.”

— Amor Towles

39. “But, of course, a thing is just a thing. And so, slipping his sister’s scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever.”

— Amor Towles

40. “Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again?”

— Amor Towles

41. “Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleagured in the middle of the night.”

— Amor Towles

42. “To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?”

— Amor Towles

43. “Fate does not take sides. It is fair-minded and generally prefers to maintain some balance between the likelihood of success and failure in all our endeavors.”

— Amor Towles

44. “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.”

— Amor Towles

45. “Who would have imagined,” he said, “when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”

— Amor Towles

46. “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.”

— Amor Towles

47. “History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow. There.”

— Amor Towles

48. “You have always been fond of little Nina.” “Of course I have.” “And in part, that is because she is such an independent spirit.” “Precisely.” “Then you must trust in her. And even if she is single-minded to a fault, you must trust that life will find her in time. For eventually, it finds us all.” The Count nodded for a moment, reflecting on Marina’s.”

— Amor Towles

49. “There is not, I think, a single country in the civilized world where less attention is paid to philosophy than in the United States.”

— Amor Towles

50. “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.”

— Amor Towles