Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

The brass latch on the heavy oaken door had been pulled so many times that it was a soft, luminescent gold, like the foot of a saint on a cathedral door.

I went to make myself some closed-kitchen eggs. I cracked two eggs in a bowl and whisked them with grated cheese and herbs. I poured them into a pan of heated oil and covered them with a lid. Something about heating the oil and putting on the lid makes the eggs puff upon contact. And they brown without burning. It was the way my father used to prepare eggs for me when I was a girl, though we never ate them for breakfast. They tasted best, he used to say, when the kitchen was closed.

for me (insensibly) a pack of cards and Walden by Thoreau—the only book in which infinity can be found on every other page.

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

Charlotte had thick black eyebrows, but she also had delicate features and beautiful skin. She could have made a favorable impression on someone if she hadn’t acted as though at any moment the city was going to step on her.

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, even if it is a foolish romance:

But if New York was a many-cogged machine, then lack of judgment was the grease that kept the gears turning smoothly for the rest of us.

Were you the president of your debating society or something? All that may have been true a hundred years ago, or whatever, but after being soaked in admiration, one generation’s genius is another’s VD.

Fran poured me a cup of coffee. I hunched over it with the blanket on my shoulders like a Civil War soldier.

With possessives, the apostrophe s is used in all proper names ending in s other than Moses and Jesus.

I could never resist the sign-off Respectfully; or those who remembered my cocktail preferences with such exactitude.

Along Central Park West, the taller apartment buildings jutted over the trees in solitary fashion like commuters on a railroad platform in the hours before the morning rush. The sky was Tiepolo blue. After a week of sudden cold, the leaves had turned, creating a bright orange canopy that stretched all the way to Harlem. It was almost as if the park was a jewel box and the sky was the lid. You had to give Olmsted credit: He was perfectly right to have bulldozed the poor to make way for it.

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.

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.

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.

For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.

After meeting someone by chance and throwing off a few sparks, can there be any substance to the feeling that you’ve known each other your whole lives? After those first few hours of conversation, can you really be sure that your connection is so uncommon that it belongs outside the bounds of time and convention?

Yes—that word that is supposed to be bliss. Yes, said Juliet. Yes, said Heloise. Yes, yes, yes, said Molly Bloom. The avowal, the affirmation, the sweet permission. But in the context of this conversation, it was poison.

Could there have been a more contrary statue to place across from one of the largest cathedrals in America? Atlas, who attempted to overthrow the gods on Olympus and was thus condemned to shoulder the celestial spheres for all eternity—the very personification of hubris and brute endurance.

In the moment, only some of those intrusions seemed welcome; but I guess I should have treasured them all. Because in a few years’ time, I’d be living in a doorman building myself—and once you’re in a doorman building, no one comes knocking ever again.

It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time—by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still? In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.