In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting - it's sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.

Amor Towles

Categorized in : World Sweet Struggle Cake

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.

Amor Towles

perfect love people

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

Amor Towles

vision twenties decision

Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don't mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I'm talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine. Walking through an unsullied hour with an unsullied heart

Amor Towles

heart night mean

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.

Amor Towles

ifs-and names civilization

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

Amor Towles

choices loss mean

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

Amor Towles

ifs years

I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

Amor Towles

finishing missing blue

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion....if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.

Amor Towles

next feel-better use

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.

Amor Towles

oddities two book

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

Amor Towles

disarming expenses laughing

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

Amor Towles

old-time used father

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

arriving wind promise

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

Amor Towles

intention proud world

If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

Amor Towles

circles light running

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

Amor Towles

cities new-york weather

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

Amor Towles

girl sorry night

Slurring is the cursive of speech.

Amor Towles

cursive speech

I suppose we don't rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment-a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.

Amor Towles

talking giving people

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

Amor Towles

confidence-boosting shooting gun

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

Amor Towles

problem new-york running