Table for Two

by Amor Towles

The wisdom of the peasant is founded on one essential axiom: While wars may come and go, statesmen rise and fall, and popular attitudes wax and wane, when all is said and done a furrow remains a furrow.

It is enough to state that their impressions of these sights were diametrically opposed.

It didn’t take long for the citizens of Moscow to realize that if you had no choice but to stand in line, then Pushkin was the man to stand next to. Graced with a gentle disposition, he was never boorish or condescending, neither full of opinions nor full of himself. Once he had commented on the fineness of the weather or the beauty of a building, he was most likely to ask about your children.

The human race is famously adaptive, but there is nothing that a human will adapt to more quickly than an improved standard of living.

Belying the social and artistic import of the author’s work, the capitalized J, D, and P were each finished with a loop that drifted high above the other letters, such that his signature gave the impression of a line of children walking in single file, three of whom were holding a helium balloon on a string.

Thus, while once we needed to marry an heiress or found a railroad in order to change our lot, today an extra fifty dollars a week will allow us to take one more step up the ladder of well-being to a tier where the soups are a little more tasty, the shirts a little more stylish, and the living rooms a little more exposed to natural light.

since the days of antiquity, those sitting in judgment of the gravest crimes have required evidence of a man’s intent and sought to classify his awareness of the moral implications of his actions. Even when one man kills another, we separate the accidental from the spontaneous and the spontaneous from the carefully planned—despite the fact that such distinctions provide no comfort to the dead.

Whatever the cause, I had learned long ago that when the delay count on an airport monitor increases from four to fifteen flights in as many minutes, you’re at the beginning of an escalating disaster.

Emotional contagion is a term coined by behavioral scientists for a fairly universal aspect of human nature—that we tend to mirror the mood signals of others.

People were variously tired, frustrated, or furious, and all the related indicators—the audible sighs, the eye rolling, the muttered profanities—were being picked up and mirrored back by everyone.

“On Christmas morning, there’s such a thin line between elation and disappointment.

But nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. At least not if you’re overeducated, overpaid, and living in New York.

By the time he shares his opinion, not only has he carefully chosen his vocabulary, he has crafted complex sentences and persuasive analogies. He has even considered likely rebuttals and fashioned counterarguments. So detailed and well articulated is his position once he decides to air it that you feel a little helpless to argue against it—even when it never made any sense in the first place.

Copyright laws were created because a world in which artists cannot secure fair compensation for their endeavors is a world less likely to contain art!

One benefit of speaking to the pompous is that their presumption of superiority is so strong, they are rarely guarded in what they have to say. If you set the mood and give them a little shove, they will pontificate accordingly.

Served at an inconvenient hour, prepared by such an army of chefs that half the dishes are overcooked, half are undercooked, and all are served cold, Thanksgiving is not a meal for a man who eats with discernment.

True!

The band’s take on the number had some advanced mathematics, and the local girls were making the most of it. They were doing long division with their hips and shaking their cans to the thirteenth power.

Clever

Having grown up on his uncle’s ranch in the Panhandle, Billy had come to L.A. at the age of sixteen with a small-time rodeo and stumbled into pictures when demand was on the rise for men who could fall off horses.

Ha!

But when it came to being thrown through a window, no one was his equal. He was the undisputed king of defenestrations.

But nowhere had she encountered as many puppeteers as in Hollywood. Every agent and manager, every director, producer, and studio chief had his arms out and his fingers extended, looking to grab a woman by the strings.

Powerful!

Maybe when one shifted from the life of doing to the life of remembering, one became more sentimental, more susceptible to the influence of one’s emotions.

For reasons she never fully understood, she had taken to church from the start. She loved the architecture with its soaring ceilings and stained-glass windows. She loved the collective silence during the moments of prayer.

the music, oh the music! To hear the organ, then the voices of the choir and congregation rising in unison. What serenity she had found there.

But Olivia had been drawn to the teachings too. Drawn to the messages of kindness and patience and humility, discovering within them a source of strength.

For in the United States of America there was nothing more exalted or sacrosanct than a wage.