Amor Towles - Rules of Civility (2011)

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

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

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

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

Amor Towles
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.

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

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

Amor Towles
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