A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them,

“Do you know that back in ’30, when they announced the mandatory collectivization of farming, half our peasants slaughtered their own livestock rather than give them up to the cooperatives? Fourteen million head of cattle left to the buzzards and flies.”

“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.”

“The irony, of course, is that the life which ended up being saved was mine, not his. But for that poem, they would have shot me back in 1922.”

He was thinking about Katerina. In particular, he was thinking—with a sense of foreboding—that in the course of twenty years this firefly, this pinwheel, this wonder of the world had become a woman who, when asked where she was going, could answer without the slightest hesitation: Does it matter?

For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”

surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.

After all, in the midst of armed conflicts, facts are bound to be just as susceptible to injury as ships and men, if not more so.