Top 280 Amor Towles Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Amor Towles

203. “Suddenly, all the people of valor were gone. One by one, they had glimmered and disappeared, leaving behind those who couldn’t free themselves from their wants: like Anne and Tinker and me.”

— Amor Towles

204. “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

205. “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

206. “What is an intention when compared to a plan?” he said, catching Osip by the sleeve. “If the sooner the better, then why not next week?”

— Amor Towles

207. “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.”

— Amor Towles

208. “But being grateful was one thing, and being beholden, that was another thing altogether.”

— Amor Towles

209. “Sometimes,” Nina clarified, “everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did everybody write the Odyssey? Did everybody write the Aeneid?” She.”

— Amor Towles

210. “As his father made painfully clear that night, to deface the pages of a book was to adopt the manner of a Visigoth. It was to strike a blow against that most sacred and noble of man’s achievements – the ability to set down his finest ideas and sentiments so that they might be shared through the ages.”

— Amor Towles

211. “To hold another man in disdain, his father would say, presumed that you knew so much about his lot, so much about his intentions, about his actions both public and private that you could rank his character against your own without fear of misjudgment.”

— Amor Towles

212. “For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.”

— Amor Towles

213. “And that’s when my allotment of not saying a word was all used up.”

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

215. “For Achilles the fatal flaw had been anger. When he was angry, Achilles could not contain himself. Even though it had been foretold that he might die during the Trojan War, once his friend Patroclus was killed, Achilles returned to the battlefield blinded by a black and murderous rage.”

— Amor Towles

216. “Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Mishka. “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.”

— Amor Towles

217. “Nina Kulikova always was and would be a serious soul in search of serious ideas to be serious about.”

— Amor Towles

218. “Lord, she says, can’t you see that my idler of a sister has left me to do all the work? Why don’t you tell her to lend me a hand? Or something to that effect. And Jesus, He replies: Martha, you are troubled by too many things when only one thing is needful. And it is Mary who has chosen the better way. Well, I’m sorry. But if ever you needed proof that the Bible was written by a man, there you have it. I.”

— Amor Towles

219. “History has shown charm to be the final ambition of the leisure class.”

— Amor Towles

220. “The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprise, that is the cruelest part. And yet it’s almost unavoidable. For at the moment when the.”

— Amor Towles

221. “Questions can be so tricky, he said, like forks in the road. You can be having such a nice conversation and someone will raise a question, and the next thing you know you’re headed off in a whole new direction. In all probability, this new road will lead you to places that are perfectly agreeable, but sometimes you just want to go in the direction you were already headed.”

— Amor Towles

222. “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

223. “It is one of the intrinsic limitations of being young, my dear, that you can never tell when a grand adventure has just begun.”

— Amor Towles

224. “Not all worth knowing can be found between the covers of compendiums, my boy. Let’s simply say that my academy was the thoroughfare, my primer experience, and my instructor the fickle finger of fate.”

— Amor Towles

225. “He was thinking about Katerina. In particular, he was thinking – with a sense of foreboding – that in the course of twenty years this firefly, this pinwheel, this wonder of the world had become a woman who, when asked where she was going, could answer without the slightest hesitation: Does it matter?”

— Amor Towles

226. “The point is, Billy, that Duchess is full of energy and enthusiasm and good intentions too. But sometimes, his energy and enthusiasm get in the way of his good intentions, and when that happens the consequences often fall on someone else.”

— Amor Towles

227. “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.”

— Amor Towles

228. “There are few things more beautiful to an author’s eye, he confessed to Billy, than a well-read copy of one of his books.”

— Amor Towles

229. “Well, if that was the case, concluded the Count, then in the new era, the duels should have been fought at no less than ten thousand paces. In fact, having thrown down the gauntlet, appointed seconds, and chosen weapons, the offender should board a steamer bound for America as the offended boards another for Japan where, upon arrival, the two men could don their finest coats, descend their gangplanks, turn on the docks, and fire.”

— Amor Towles

230. “Because a farmer with a mortgage was like a man walking on the railing of a bridge with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed. It was a way of life in which the difference between abundance and ruin could be measured by a few inches of rain or a few nights of frost.”

— Amor Towles

231. “But it had been the Count’s experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively. For while the men who pace are being whipped along by logic, it is a multifaceted sort of logic, which brings them no closer to a clear understanding, or even a state of conviction.”

— Amor Towles

232. “You may accuse a dog of eating without grace or of exhibiting a misplaced enthusiasm for the tossing of sticks, but you may never accuse one of giving up hope.”

— Amor Towles

233. “Apparently, Christmas was a big holiday for the Wolcotts. On Christmas Eve, three generations spent the night at the Adirondack camp, and while they attended the midnight service, Mrs. Wolcott would put a pair of matching pajamas on every pillow. So in the morning, they all came down to the freshly cut spruce in matching red and white stripes or a tartan plaid.”

— Amor Towles

234. “One that has the human spirit as its subject and the future as its muse!”

— Amor Towles

235. “I thought to myself that there are surely a lot of big things in America. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are big. The Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon are big. The skies over the prairie are big. But there is nothing bigger than a man’s opinion of himself.”

— Amor Towles

236. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one persons life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else.”

— Amor Towles

237. “The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from the cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.”

— Amor Towles

238. “But in all likelihood, a greater factor in the difference between the two rooms was their provenance. For if a room that exists under the governance, authority, and intent of others seems smaller than it is, then a room that exists in secret can, regardless of its dimensions, seem as vast as one cares to imagine.”

— Amor Towles

239. “Moments with other people, he found, were much more likely to be filled with laughter and surprises than moments with oneself. And moments with oneself were more likely to circle inward toward some thought that one didn’t want to be having in the first place. But on this occasion, on this occasion that he found himself with a moment to himself, Woolly welcomed it.”

— Amor Towles

240. “What Woolly did not tell Billy was that sometimes – like when he first arrived at St. Paul’s – he would wind the watch sixteen times for six days in a row on porpoise so that he could be half an hour ahead of everybody else.”

— Amor Towles

241. “Arriving late, thought the Count with a sigh. What a delicacy of youth.”

— Amor Towles

242. “Thoreau says that men mistakenly think of truth as being remote – behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the reckoning. When in fact, all these times and places and occasions are now and here.”

— Amor Towles

243. “Having taken a moment to look over the kitchen with all of its activity and abundance, to look from gentle Andrey to heartfelt Emile, he turned to the Count. “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

244. “Whenever I come to a new town, I like to get my bearings. I want to understand the layout of the streets and the layout of the people. In some cities this can take you days to accomplish. In Boston, it can take you weeks. In New York, years. The great thing about Morgen, Nebraska, is it only took a few minutes.”

— Amor Towles

245. “In a way, the whiskey bottle was sort of like a pencil with eraser – with one end used for saying things, and the other for taking them back.”

— Amor Towles

246. “But Warden Williams was a modern man with a master’s degree and good intentions and a framed photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt hanging behind his desk. He had notions that he’d gathered from books and experience, and he had plenty of words at his disposal to turn them into counsel.”

— Amor Towles

247. “Half the time when you could use the help of a man, he’s nowhere to be found. He’s off seeing to one thing or another that could just as easily be seen to tomorrow as seen to today and that just happens to be five steps out of earshot. But as soon as you need him to be somewhere else, you can’t push him out the door.”

— Amor Towles

248. “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Sometimes, it sure seems that’s what life intends. After all, it’s basically like a centrifuge that spins every few years casting proximate bodies in disparate directions. And when the spinning stops, almost before we can catch our breath, life crowds us with a calendar of new concerns.”

— Amor Towles

249. “You’ve got to love that about Woolly. He’s always running about five minutes late, showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the conversation is pulling out of the station.”

— Amor Towles

250. “Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.”

— Amor Towles