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

202. “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

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

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

206. “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

207. “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

208. “I have been known to scuff the parquet.”

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

— Amor Towles

211. “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

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

— Amor Towles

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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. “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

229. “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

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. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Amor Towles

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “Good God, he thought. Is it possible? Already? At the age of forty-eight? “Alexander Rostov, could it be that you have become settled in your ways?”

— Amor Towles

244. “After all, in the midst of armed conflicts, facts are bound to be just as susceptible to injury as ships and men, if not more so.”

— Amor Towles

245. “Moments with other people, he found, were much more likely to be filled with laughter and surprises than moments with oneself.”

— Amor Towles

246. “Whom I blame is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and every other man who’s served as priest or preacher since.”

— Amor Towles

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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