The Lincoln Highway

by Amor Towles

She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death ….

But being grateful was one thing, and being beholden, that was another thing altogether.

While I’m at it, are there any other people who’ve been giving you trouble? Emmett rolled down his window and tossed out the cigarette. —Mostly, he said, what people have been giving me is advice.

The willingness to take a beating: That’s how you can tell you’re dealing with a man of substance. A man like that doesn’t linger on the sidelines throwing gasoline on someone else’s fire; and he doesn’t go home unscathed. He presents himself front and center, undaunted, prepared to stand his ground until he can’t stand at all.

Boys, she would begin in her motherly way, in your time you shall do wrong unto others and others shall do wrong unto you. And these opposing wrongs will become your chains. The wrongs you have done unto others will be bound to you in the form of guilt, and the wrongs that others have done unto you in the form of indignation. The teachings of Jesus Christ Our Savior are there to free you from both. To free you from your guilt through atonement and from your indignation through forgiveness. Only once you have freed yourself from both of these chains may you begin to live your life with love in your heart and serenity in your step.

What wisdom the Lord does not see fit to endow us with at birth, He provides through the gift of experience.

Walking out of the alley, I became conscious not simply of a welling sense of moral satisfaction, but that my footfall felt a little lighter and my stride a little jauntier. Well, what do you know, I thought to myself with a smile. There’s serenity in my step!

In Woolly’s experience, when someone asks if they can speak to someone else in private, it is difficult to know what to do with yourself. For one thing, they generally don’t tell you how long they’re going to be, so it’s hard to know how deeply you should involve yourself in some new endeavor.

George’s and St. Mark’s and St. Paul’s organized every day to be an every-day day not because it made things easier to manage, but because it was the best possible means by which to prepare the fine young men in their care to catch the 6:42 so that they would always be on time for their meetings at 8:00.

A one-of-a-kind kind of day.

Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.

For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired?

there is no kindness in any of that. For kindness begins where necessity ends.

one movie theater and one restaurant; one cemetery and one savings and loan; in all likelihood, one sense of right and wrong.

Well, that’s life in a nutshell, ain’t it. Lovin’ to go to one place and havin’ to go to another.

How much longer do you need to talk to a stranger before they become your friend? For a moment, Emmett considered wading into the intricacies of how relationships evolve over time. Instead, he said: —Ten days.

We’ll agree that it takes at least three days for someone to become a friend. But before that we’ll think of them as strangers. —Or acquaintances, said Billy. —Or acquaintances. The brothers went back

Surely, this was the way that Abraham Lincoln had meant his Address to be recited. Not as a little boy standing alone at the head of a table in an itchy coat, but as four generations of a family speaking together in unison.

But I had taken the time to do my arithmetic with care, and I was pretty confident that Ackerly’s debt to me would be satisfied with one solid whack on the crown. To hit him a second time would just put me in his debt. So I returned the skillet to the stovetop and slipped out the kitchen door, thinking: One down, two to go.

The chance was given. Each one of us has come from disparate parts to serve our disparate sentences for the commission of disparate crimes. But faced with a shared tribulation, we are given an opportunity—a rare and precious opportunity—to be men of one accord. Let us not shirk before what Fortune has laid at our feet. Let us take it up like a banner and march into the breach, such that many years from now, when we look back, we will be able to say that though we were condemned to days of drudgery, we faced them undaunted and shoulder to shoulder.

No, I don’t put much stake in apologies. They always seem a day late and a dollar short. What I had in mind is something more concrete. Like a settling of accounts.

illuminated the page with his flashlight beam—a circle of light within a circle of light within a sea of darkness.

If I learned anything in the war, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—that moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on.

did like you said, Ulysses. When Pastor John told me that I was alone, I imagined that I had been forsaken by everyone, including my Maker. Then I kicked him and hid beneath the firewood tarp.

Questions can be so tricky, he said, like forks in the road. You can be having such a nice conversation and someone will raise a question, and the next thing you know you’re headed off in a whole new direction.

Luckily it was in color, so you could take note of all the clothes you would never want to wear.

This one had a little copper sink with a copper counter, and vases in every imaginable color and size, so that Sarah could perfectly display every bouquet of flowers that Dennis would never bring her.

He’d simply never taken to the idea of sitting in a crowd to watch someone do something more interesting than what you were doing yourself.

That’s where the expression crossing the Rubicon comes from. It means passing a point of no return.

Now, instead of telling me where I couldn’t park, he was opening Woolly’s door and ushering us into the building with a tip of the hat. Capitalism, they call it.

What’s more, he was not the sort to hurry you along because time was money, or of the essence, or a stitch in nine, or what have you.

as soon as you start providing these essential details, will start to make a face. They’ll fidget in their seat. Then they’ll do their best to hurry you along by pressing you to leap from point A to point Z while skipping all the letters in between. But not Professor Abernathe. When he asked Billy a deceptively simple question and Billy went all the way back to the cradle in order to give a comprehensive reply, the professor leaned back in his chair and listened with the attentiveness of Solomon.

when Ulysses said to Professor Abernathe, I might finally have earned the right to hope again, Woolly understood that here was a question disguised as a statement. And Woolly found it to be beautiful.

I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing.

had set about alphabetizing the spice rack. And it didn’t take long for him to discover just how many spices began with the letter C.

Another one of Sister Agnes’s favorite sayings was the wise man tattles on himself.

But maybe, I was thinking as I was driving over the Hudson River, just maybe the will to stay put stems not from a man’s virtues but from his vices. After all, aren’t gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying put? Don’t they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more?

In a way, pride and envy are about staying put too. For just as pride is founded on what you’ve built up around you, envy is founded on what your neighbor has built across the street.

and withdraw a platter on which sat a perfectly roasted bird surrounded by all the fixings. For a moment, the magician and audience would share the silence of the stunned. Then raising his gaze from the platter, Manny would look out into the theater and say: Oops.

Combination? he asked. Then I laughed. I laughed until my kidneys hurt and the tears poured out of my eyes. Like I said: When it comes to vaudeville, it’s all about the setup.

Emmett found himself wondering was what virtue did Mrs. Whitney have too much of? The answer, his instincts told him, though he was almost reluctant to admit it, was probably forgiveness.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful, thought Woolly, if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snugly in its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete.

The important thing to understand about listening to a mystery show on the radio, Woolly well knew, is that all the parts designed to make you anxious—like the whispering of assassins, or the rustling of leaves, or the creaking of steps on a staircase—were relatively quiet. While the parts designed to set your mind at ease—like the sudden epiphany of the hero, or the peeling of his tires, or the crack of his pistol—were relatively loud. So if you turned the volume down to two and a half, you could barely hear the parts designed to make you anxious, while still getting to hear all the parts designed to set your mind at ease.

Abacus had come to the conclusion that the greatest of heroic stories have the shape of a diamond on its side. Beginning at a fine point, the life of the hero expands outward through youth as he begins to establish his strengths and fallibilities, his friendships and enmities. Proceeding into the world, he pursues exploits in grand company, accumulating honors and accolades. But at some untold moment, the two rays that define the outer limits of this widening world of hale companions and worthy adventures simultaneously turn a corner and begin to converge.

So perhaps it is not surprising that just a matter of days after Achilles succeeds in killing Hector, a poison arrow lofting through the air pierces the one unprotected spot on Achilles’s body—the ankle by which his mother had held him when she dipped him in the Styx.

the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory. And in those first years, as the rays begin to angle inward, the world still seems so open, you have no reason to suspect its diminishment.

First, I tried putting my ear against the metal and turning the dials to hear the clicks of the tumblers like they do in the movies—which worked about as well as anything else you try doing that you’ve seen in the movies.

And when the final chime sounded, I turned to them all in order to utter with my very last breath, The rest is silence, just as Hamlet had. Or was that Iago? I never could remember.