Amor Towles Quotes

If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us...then there wouldn't be so much fuss about love in the first place.

If you could relive one year in your life, which one would it be? [...] The upcoming one.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?

Old times, as my father used to say: If you're not careful, they'll gut you like a fish.

For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.

That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.

I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.

That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weather wane - or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.

Learning dance steps was the sorry Saturday night pursuit of every boardinghouse girl in America.

Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn't very polite.' 'I'm sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn't seem to stop the rest of us.

If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.

Slurring is the cursive of speech.

Be careful when choosing what you're proud of--because the world has every intention of using it against you

In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

That's the problem with being born in New York, the old newsman observed a little sadly. You've got no New York to run away to.

There are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.

To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?

I’m willing to be under anything, she said, as long as it isn’t somebody’s thumb.

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair.

...but the tenure of friendships has never been governed by the passage of time.

Katey's the hottest bookworm you'll ever meet. If you took all the books that she's read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.

Ever since [that day], a small uncertainty had buzzed between us.It was a sense of chemistry that had been a little elusive, a little imprecise, until now.