Top 280 Amor Towles Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Amor Towles

152. “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.”

— Amor Towles

153. “Some, no doubt, would simply dismiss it as a by-product of barbarism. Given Russia’s long, heartless winters, its familiarity with famine, its rough sense of justice, and so on, and so on, it was perfectly natural for its gentry to adopt an act of definitive violence as the means of resolving disputes.”

— Amor Towles

154. “Whether through careful consideration spawned by books and spirited debate over coffee at two in the morning, or simply from a natural proclivity, we must all eventually adopt a fundamental framework, some reasonable coherent system of causes and effects that will help us make sense not simply of momentous events, but of all the little actions and interactions that constitute our daily lives–be they deliberate or spontaneous, inevitable or unforeseen.”

— Amor Towles

155. “Older and shorter, Henry Grey was a painter who lived in the West Village. When Eve asked what was the best word to describe him, after thinking a moment Tinker settled on unwavering – because his brother had always who he was and what he wanted to do.”

— Amor Towles

156. “I suppose Anne was right when she observed that at any given moment we’re all seeking someone’s forgiveness.”

— Amor Towles

157. “Was the minding of one’s own business no longer a subject taught in schools? “Like.”

— Amor Towles

158. “Because well he knew that when one is traveling abroad for the first time, one does not wish to look back on laborsome instructions, weighty advice, or tearful sentiments. Like the memory of the simple soup, when one is homesick what one will find most comforting to recall are those lighthearted little stories that have been told a thousand times before.”

— Amor Towles

159. “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.”

— Amor Towles

160. “In principle, the Count generally regarded a barrage of interrogatives as bad form. Left to themselves, the words who, what, why, when, and where do not a conversation make.”

— Amor Towles

161. “Not one to be outmaneuvered by another man’s childishness, the Count pouted.”

— Amor Towles

162. “But, alas, sleep did not come so easily to our weary friend. Like in a reel in which the dancers form two rows, so that one of their number can come skipping brightly down the aisle, a concern of the Count’s would present itself for his consideration, bow with a flourish, and then take its place at the end of the line so that the next concern could come dancing to the fore.”

— Amor Towles

163. “It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life,” he began, “that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces. So I view it as an incredible stroke of good fortune at this stage in my life to have found such a fine new friend.”

— Amor Towles

164. “But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

— Amor Towles

165. “Apparently, for all their powers of invention, the Russian masters could not come up with a better plot device than two central characters resolving a matter of conscience by means of pistols at thirty-two paces.” “I.”

— Amor Towles

166. “A second-act setback – in which, having started confidently along a particular trajectory, we come face-to-face with our own limitations.”

— Amor Towles

167. “The Count shifted his chair a little leftward in order to put the clock out of view, then he searched for the passage he’d been reading. He was almost certain it was in the fifth paragraph on the fifteenth page. But as he delved back into that paragraph’s prose, the context seemed utterly unfamiliar; as did the paragraphs that immediately preceded it. In fact, he had to turn back three whole pages before he found a passage that he recalled well enough to resume his progress in good faith.”

— Amor Towles

168. “He could easily pace twenty miles in a twenty-foot room. He could pace thirty miles in an opera box and fifty in a confessional.”

— Amor Towles

169. “But I don’t simply want to learn the languages. I want to understand those who speak them.”

— Amor Towles

170. “No doubt there have been moments when your life has taken a bit of a leap forward; and no doubt you look back upon those moments with self-assurance and pride. But was there really no third party deserving of even a modicum of credit?”

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

172. “But of course, the Count also wept for himself. For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sofia – that extraordinary blessing that had struck him from the blue – when Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich died, there went the last of those who had known him as a younger man.”

— Amor Towles

173. “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful, thought Woolly, if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snugly in its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete.”

— Amor Towles

174. “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 the human emotions.”

— Amor Towles

175. “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.”

— Amor Towles

176. “It was a sweet display of self-confidence, as he no longer felt the need to entertain me or to advertise his claim on my attentions. It goes to show that even a man who craves constant approval can attain self-assurance through a little hanky-panky.”

— Amor Towles

177. “Unjustly imprisoned, he sustained himself by plotting the systematic undoing of his personal agents of villainy.”

— Amor Towles

178. “He looked like a man who had gained confidence through exposure to a hostile environment; like one who no longer owed anything to anyone.”

— Amor Towles

179. “This led to a debate between the two men on the differences between what was probable, plausible, and possible.”

— Amor Towles

180. “But all the while, he suspected that the life he was living so reliably was not his own. Those seven years he had just spent becoming a captain of industry and a deacon of the church were his father’s fifties. His reckless twenties had eluded him altogether.”

— Amor Towles

181. “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.”

— Amor Towles

182. “Or rather, he stood at a slight tilt induced by the wine, a sort of 12:02.”

— Amor Towles

183. “But, Audrius, I have never taken the lift in my life!”

— Amor Towles

184. “Allow me to tell you what is inevitable. What is inevitable is that Life will pay Nina a visit too. She may be as sober as St. Augustine, but she is too alert and too vibrant for Life to let her shake a hand and walk off alone. Life will follow her in a taxi. It will bump into her by chance. It will work its way into her affections. And to do so, it will beg, barter, collude, and if necessary, resort to chicanery.”

— Amor Towles

185. “It is one of the most basic principles of infinity that it must, by definition, encompass not only one of everything, but everything’s duplicate, as well as its triplicate. In fact, to imagine that there are additional versions of ourselves scattered across human history is substantially less outlandish than to imagine that there are none.”

— Amor Towles

186. “If we earn fifty cents an hour, we admire the rich and pity the poor, and we reserve the full force of our venom for those who make a penny more or a penny less.”

— Amor Towles

187. “Oh,” said Sofia, bringing the topic to a close with the efficiency of the guillotine.”

— Amor Towles

188. “In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquium, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.”

— Amor Towles

189. “Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one’s friends had no desire to venture in.”

— Amor Towles

190. “Because young children don’t know how things are supposed to be done, they will come to imagine that the habits of their household are the habits of the world. If a child grows up in a family where angry words are exchanged over supper, he will assume that angry words are exchanged at every kitchen table; while if a child grows up in a family where no words are exchanged over supper at all, he will assume that all families eat in silence.”

— Amor Towles

191. “There is nothing pleasant to be said about losing,” she began, “and the Obolensky boy is a pill. But, Sasha, my dear, why on earth would you give him the satisfaction?”

— Amor Towles

192. “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.”

— Amor Towles

193. “Could one possibly accuse him of nostalgia or idleness, of wasting his time simply because he had read the story two or three times before? Sitting.”

— Amor Towles

194. “What, Woolly? What would be absotively magnificent? – A one-of-a-kind kind of day.”

— Amor Towles

195. “And I do it because it’s unnecessary. For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired?”

— Amor Towles

196. “But as the Greeks teach us, there is only one remedy for that sort of hubris. They called it nemesis. We call it getting what you deserve, or a finger in the eye, or comeuppance for short. And it comes with an appropriate raise in pay, responsibilities, and professional status.”

— Amor Towles

197. “Just a few weeks before, no detail of my life had been big enough to merit my attention.”

— Amor Towles

198. “Mishka has his “project”; and this young architect, unable to build buildings, takes pride and pleasure from the careful drafting of hotel interiors in his sketchbook.”

— Amor Towles

199. “To be seduced? Why, that was a matter of leaning back in one’s chair, sipping one’s wine, and responding to a query with the very first thought that has popped into one’s head. And.”

— Amor Towles

200. “The world is wide, and wondrous are the ways of men...”

— Amor Towles