Top 280 Amor Towles Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Amor Towles

203. “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

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

— Amor Towles

205. “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

206. “The willingness to take a beating: That’s how you can tell you’re dealing with a man of substance. A man like that doesn’t linger on the sidelines throwing gasoline on someone else’s fire; and he doesn’t go home unscathed. He presents himself front and center, undaunted, prepared to stand his ground until he can’t stand at all.”

— Amor Towles

207. “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

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

— Amor Towles

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Amor Towles

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— 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. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “What right did he have to demand of Duchess that he atone for his sins? What right did he have to demand it of anyone?”

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

235. “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

236. “From a man’s point of view, the one thing that’s needful is that you sit at his feet and listen to what he has to say, no matter how long it takes for him to say it, or how often he’s said it before. By his figuring, you have plenty of time for sitting and listening because a meal is something that makes itself.”

— Amor Towles

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “If we are asked to apply ourselves to that which is before us, we are less likely to fret over that which is not.”

— Amor Towles

241. “I do believe that the Good Lord has a mission for each and every one of us – a mission that is forgiving of our weaknesses, tailored to our strengths, and designed with only us in mind. But maybe He doesn’t come knocking on our door and present it to us all frosted like a cake. Maybe, just maybe what He requires of us, what He expects of us, what He hopes for us is that – like His only begotten Son – we will go out into the world and find it for ourselves.”

— Amor Towles

242. “It stands to reason that if we all agreed to let summer vacation last until the equinox, the world would be a much happier place.”

— Amor Towles

243. “But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, this sense of anticipation waned, and slowly, but surely, I stopped expecting to see him in a crowd. Swept along by the currents of my own ambitions and commitments, my daily life laid the groundwork for the grace of forgetting.”

— Amor Towles

244. “You could almost hear the thumb of reality beginning to press down on that spot in the soul from which youthful enthusiasm springs.”

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

246. “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

247. “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.”

— Amor Towles

248. “The romantic interplay that we were having wasn’t the real game – it was a modified version of the game. It was a version invented for two friends so that they can get some practice and pass the time divertingly while they eat in the station for their train to arrive.”

— Amor Towles

249. “Mark my words, my friend: We have not burned Moscow to the ground for the last time.”

— Amor Towles

250. “Most people make a habit of asking for things. At the drop of a hat, they’ll ask you for a light or for the time. They’ll ask you for a lift or a loan. For a hand or a handout. Some of them will even ask you for forgiveness. But Woolly Martin rarely asked for anything at all. So when he did ask for something, you knew it was something that mattered.”

— Amor Towles