But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of the Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond.....

— Amor Towles

But of course, the Count also wept for himself. For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sofia - that extraordinary blessing that had struck him from the blue - when Mikhail Fyodorovich Munich died, there went the last of those who had known him as a younger man.

— Amor Towles

But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoe's seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, it’s climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration--and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.

— Amor Towles

Data'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.

— Amor Towles

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.

— Amor Towles

For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.

— Amor Towles

For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.

— Amor Towles

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

— Amor Towles