Top 280 Amor Towles Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Amor Towles

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Amor Towles

264. “The funny thing about a picture, thought Woolly, the funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment it’s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And unreversible.”

— Amor Towles

265. “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

266. “I freed my hands and put a palm on the smooth skin of his cheek, taking comfort in the well-counseled patience for that which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and, most important, endures them.”

— Amor Towles

267. “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.”

— Amor Towles

268. “What wisdom the Lord does not see fit to endow us with at birth, He provides through the gift of experience.”

— Amor Towles

269. “Emmett wasn’t one for circuses. He wasn’t one for magic shows or rodeos. He hadn’t even liked going to the football games at his high school, which were attended by nearly everyone in town. He’d simply never taken to the idea of sitting in a crowd to watch someone do something more interesting than what you were doing yourself.”

— Amor Towles

270. “The son of an Okie who hadn’t had enough sense to leave Oklahoma back in the thirties, Tommy Ladue was the sort of guy who looked like he was wearing overalls even when he wasn’t.”

— Amor Towles

271. “But for most people, it doesn’t matter where they live. When they get up in the morning they’re not looking to change the world. They want to have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, put in their eight hours, and wrap up the day with a bottle of beer in front of the TV set. More or less it’s what they’d be doing whether they lived in Atlanta, Georgia, or Nome, Alaska. And if it doesn’t matter for most people where they live, it certainly doesn’t matter where they’re going.”

— Amor Towles

272. “Sophistry. From the Greek sophistes – those teachers of philosophy and rhetoric who gave their students the skills to make arguments that could be clever or persuasive but which weren’t necessarily grounded in reality.”

— Amor Towles

273. “But I won’t be able to make a start of setting it down until I know where the middle of it is.”

— Amor Towles

274. “Please allow me a second chance at a first impression.”

— Amor Towles

275. “Whatever their story, Eve was breathing easy now – for the moment forgetful, vulnerable, at peace. It’s a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that’s why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they’re fast asleep.”

— Amor Towles

276. “If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit – a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children – and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness. Just as someone can be too smart for their own good, there are those who are too patient for their own good, or too hardworking.”

— Amor Towles

277. “But for the Count, his philosophical leanings had always been essentially meteorological. Specifically, he believed in the inevitable influence of clement and inclement weathers. He believed in the influence of early frosts and lingering summers, of ominous clouds and delicate rains, of fog and sunshine and snowfall. And he believed, most especially, in the reshaping of destinies by the slightest change in the thermometer.”

— Amor Towles

278. “That’s the sort of thing young people do: fan the flames of each other’s expectations – until the necessities of life begin to make themselves known.”

— Amor Towles

279. “Emmett shook his head, uncertain of whether his father’s actions should give him cause for disappointment or admiration. As usual with such puzzles of the heart, the answer was probably both.”

— Amor Towles

280. “He began at the beginning – the very beginning – by opening to the endpapers. And it was a good thing he had.”

— Amor Towles

281. “Yes. The question of industry. That is an excellent place to dig in, Osip. Right at the heart of it. What do you make of it?” “But I was asking what you made of it, Alexander.” “And you shall hear what I think without fail. But as your tutor, I would be remiss were I to skew your impressions before you had the chance to formulate them yourself. So let us begin with the freshness of your thoughts.”

— Amor Towles

282. “One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.”

— Amor Towles

283. “For the times do, in fact, change. They change relentlessly. Inevitably. Inventively.”

— Amor Towles

284. “And from all of these pages upon pages, one thing I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it.”

— Amor Towles

285. “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. Some might find the trait a little exasperating, but I’d take a guy who runs five minutes late over a guy who runs five minutes early, any day of the week.”

— Amor Towles

286. “And when we crossed into Nebraska? I thought I was going to get a concussion from the divots in the road. Someone should write a letter to the governor!”

— Amor Towles

287. “Preparing for a potential celebration is a tricky business. If Fortune smiles, then one must be ready to hit the ceiling with the cork. But if Fortune shrugs, then one must be prepared to act as if this were just another night, one of no particular consequence – and then later sink the unopened bottle to the bottom of the sea.”

— Amor Towles

288. “From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time. Such is the fate of iron ore.”

— Amor Towles

289. “But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one – at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.”

— Amor Towles

290. “Popular wisdom tells us that when the reel of our concerns interferes with our ability to fall asleep, the best remedy is the counting of sheep in a meadow. But preferring to have his lamb encrusted with herbs and served with a red wine reduction, the Count chose a different methodology altogether.”

— Amor Towles

291. “That’s what rattled people do. They point a finger. They point a finger at whoever’s standing closest – and given the nature of how we congregate, that’s more likely to be friend than foe.”

— Amor Towles

292. “The funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment its taken, it knows nothing about what will happen next.”

— Amor Towles

293. “For the times do, in fact, change. They change relentlessly. Inevitably. Inventively. And as they change, they set into bright relief not only outmoded honorifics and hunting horns, but silver summoners and mother-of-pearl opera glasses and all manner of carefully crafted things that have outlived their usefulness.”

— Amor Towles

294. “It was crowded in the middle of the gallery, so we kept to the periphery, walking past the pictures. The faces flickered by like the faces of prisoners looking through those little square openings in maximum security cells.”

— Amor Towles

295. “Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious.”

— Amor Towles

296. “But what weighed on his father the most – what weighed on them both – was the realization that when Emmett’s mother had gripped her husband’s hand as the fireworks began, it hadn’t been in gratitude for his persistence, for his fealty and support, it had been in gratitude that by gently coaxing her from her malaise in order to witness this magical display, he had reminded her of what joy could be, if only she were willing to leave her daily life behind.”

— Amor Towles

297. “Simply put, Ellie Watson was her own person. And to speculate on why she did what she did when she did it, one might just as well wonder why a monarch butterfly, having flown from Mexico to Nebraska in the month of May, happens to land on one flower instead of another.”

— Amor Towles

298. “But for your information, telling someone they didn’t have to go to the trouble of doing something is not the same as showing gratitude for it. Not by a long shot.”

— Amor Towles

299. “Those we have loved never slip away from us entirely.”

— Amor Towles