Top 280 Amor Towles Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.”

— Amor Towles

152. “I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubts that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.”

— Amor Towles

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Amor Towles

156. “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

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

— Amor Towles

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

162. “Nope, I said to myself while climbing into bed and switching off the light, there is no kindness in any of that. For kindness begins where necessity ends.”

— Amor Towles

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Amor Towles

166. “But oftentimes, Sofia, our best course of action appears objectionable at the first step. In fact, it almost always does.”

— Amor Towles

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

171. “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

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

— Amor Towles

173. “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

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

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Amor Towles

181. “With all due respect to poetic concision, the male of the species was endowed with a pair when a single might have sufficed.”

— Amor Towles

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Amor Towles

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Amor Towles

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “But if the lights of the Kremlin shimmered brightly, like all earthly lights before them they were diminished in their beauty by the majesty of the constellations overhead.”

— Amor Towles

196. “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

197. “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

198. “Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest.”

— Amor Towles

199. “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

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

— Amor Towles