Table for Two

by Amor Towles

But if Irina was quiet, she was quiet the way a heated skillet is quiet—in the moments before you drop in the fat.

For to serve the ones we love and receive their approval in return, need life be any more complicated than that?

Times of upheaval throw off orphans like sparks.

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

What Communism actually guaranteed is that in place of lineage and luck, the State would determine who should get what after taking careful account of the greater good.

As a wife, there are times when no matter how you feel, you need to stand at your husband’s side to lend him moral support. This wasn’t one of them.

After the age of sixty-five one wishes to travel less, eat less, own less. At that point, there is no better way to end one’s day than with a few sips of an old Scotch, a few pages of an old novel, and a king-size bed without distractions.

Oh, Yeah!!

The personality of a man always poses the biggest obstacle to his own education, thought Charlie. He’s either too proud, too stubborn, or too timid to submit to the process of discovery. Many of life’s lessons come through trial or tribulation, and the cost of those lessons shouldn’t be taken lightly. But at least half of what a man hasn’t learned in his lifetime he could have learned with ease. This is one of the insights that comes with age—when one understands the nature of discovery but no longer has the time or energy to submit to its splendors. Thus, we are doomed to end our days in an ignorance largely of our own making.

For he had no doubt that Miss Ross had wielded the scissors herself and then destroyed the more revealing remnants. If a man had retrieved the photographs, he wouldn’t have done so. He would have delivered them in their entirety. But to what end? For there weren’t more than a handful of men in the entire business—at any level—who could be trusted to take possession of these images innocently.

For the world to have any sense of justice, a team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and paintbrushes and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.