Five Quotes, vol. xxix

 

I've been re-reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, and this week K.J. and I attended a virtual interview with him hosted by our beloved American Library in Paris.  It was such a delight, and if you also loved that book, you can watch the entire event replayed on YouTube.  The last two questions Towles answers are K.J.'s!  Towles' writing is beautiful. Here are five passages I copied out this week.

"You sound as if you dreamed of living in America."
"Everyone dreams of living in America."

"That's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous?  Half of the inhabitants of Europe would move there tomorrow just for the conveniences."

- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

"But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most."

- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

"It is one of the intrinsic limitations of being young, my dear, that you can never tell when a grand adventure has just begun."

- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

"And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty..."

- from Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky (quoted in A Gentleman in Moscow)

"Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds.  It unfolds.  At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions.  Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually.  Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew."

- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles