The Lincoln Highway

by Amor Towles

There is nothing so enigmatic as the human will—or so the headshrinkers would have you believe. According to them, the motivations of a man are a castle without a key. They form a multilayered labyrinth from which individual actions often emerge without a readily discernible rhyme or reason.

It stands to reason that if we all agreed to let summer vacation last until the equinox, the world would be a much happier place.

everything of value in this life must be earned. That it should be earned. Because those who are given something of value without having to earn it are bound to squander it.

to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it.

Isn’t that just perfect, thought Emmett. In addition to handing down the lessons of Zeno, scholars have handed down a specialized word, the sole purpose of which is to identify the practice of teaching nonsense as sense.

like one who’s being carried down a wide river on a warm summer day.

So many uses of journey imagery

the funny thing about a picture is that while it knows everything that’s happened up until the moment it’s been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next.