“Most people have more needs than wants. That's why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs.”

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

“Mostly, he said, I've been thinking about what I'm not going to do. When I think of the last few years, I've been hounded by regrets for what's already happened and fears for what might. By nostalgia for what I've lost and desire for what I don't have. All this wanting and not wanting. It's worn me out. For once, I'm going to try the present on for size. -Amor Towles from Rules of Civility”

“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.”

“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.”

“It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled... time enough, as the poet said, to murder and create -- or at least, to have warranted the dropping of a question on one's plate.”

“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.”