A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.

But imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Life has been generous to me in its variety.”

“Who would have imagined,” he said, “when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”