Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

An act of generosity rarely ends a man’s responsibilities toward another; it tends instead to begin them.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book,

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.

Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice. Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.

The only consolation in being humiliated is having the presence of mind to leave immediately.

You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can’t argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying.

Yes, they’re formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying.

—Life is full of misleading signals. She smiled conspiratorially. —Yes. Rebuses and labyrinths. We rarely know exactly where we stand in relation to someone else, and we never know where two confederates stand in relation to each other. But the sum of the angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees—isn’t it.

—Whiskey? —Your pleasure is mine, I said.