Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The superego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into an ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.

By the summer that Val and I had begun seeing each other, we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled. It was 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’m willing to be under anything, she said, as long as it isn’t somebody’s thumb.

—That doesn’t work for long, my slender one. —Says you. —Says the sun, the moon and the stars.

Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you’re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.

—Emily Post says that talking about oneself isn’t very polite. —I’m sure Miss Post is perfectly correct, but that doesn’t seem to stop the rest of us.

When she swerved onto Sixth Avenue, Tinker almost grabbed the wheel. But as we zigzagged through traffic, she drove in one fluid motion, accelerating and decelerating in imperceptible increments like a shark cutting through water, timing each light to the second. So we both sat back, quiet and wide-eyed—like others who put themselves in the hands of a higher power.

Etc. Did I say et cetera? There were 110 of them!

Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish.

Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.

One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

He captured the poetry of the King James version and he punched every they like his life depended on it, in celebration of this central paradox of Christianity—that the weak and weary would be the ones who would walk away with it all. But on the Broadway local on a Saturday night, all you had to do was look around you to see that this guy didn’t know what he was talking about.

If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.

But still, you have to ask yourself: If it’s such an uplifting song, then why did Billie Holiday sing it so well?

—I probably shouldn’t tell you this, I said. —Kay-Kay, those are my six favorite words in the English language. So I told her.

—No. It’s just that reading is the cheapest form of entertainment. —Sex is the cheapest form of entertainment. —Not in this house.

—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.

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion—whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say.

—I’m next to godliness, I said.

Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.

—If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.

time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.