You Have Arrived at Your Destination Quotes

“A second-act setback—in which, having started confidently along a particular trajectory, we come face-to-face with our own limitations.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“our strengths don’t serve us well in every circumstance at every phase of our lives. As we grow and enter new contexts, our longer-term strengths can suddenly hamper our worldly progress, which in turn can create dissonance at home.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“It goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“We’re all born with certain strengths which, ideally, are fostered by our parents and positively reinforced through education and peer interaction. But our strengths don’t serve us well in every circumstance at every phase of our lives. As we grow and enter new contexts, our longer-term strengths can suddenly hamper our worldly progress, which in turn can create dissonance at home. When we find ourselves in that situation, eventually we have to confront the fact that the way we’ve approached life in the past is not effective in our current situation. Just as Daniel has to recognize that his good-natured predisposition, which served him so well in his youth, may not serve him as well when he is an urban professional in a competitive field.” HT’s tone shifted back to enthusiastic. “Now, there are some personalities who, faced with this realization, might try to transform themselves into someone they are not. What I love about Annie’s choice is that, in this version of Daniel, he embraces who he has been from the start. Rather than changing his behavior, he changes his context. He picks up his family and moves to a world where his virtues are more closely aligned with a path to happiness. We are who we are, right? There’s no point in pushing our personalities uphill.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“The Model S could accelerate from zero to sixty in two seconds, travel three hundred miles without a recharge, and the engine had been designed with such care, you could hardly hear it hum. It also came with a self-driving system.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“The Model S could accelerate from zero to sixty in two seconds, travel three hundred miles without a recharge, and the engine had been designed with such care, you could hardly hear it hum.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“We’re not going to introduce any new elements into your DNA, nor are we going to take any existing elements out. Rather, having taken a peek into the traits that your child will naturally receive, with your and Annie’s guidance, we’re going to push a few into the forefront and a few into the background. We like to think of it as genetic nudging.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“His spirits raised by the sight, Sam patted his pants and jacket pockets to see if he had any change—but of course he didn’t. Who the hell had change anymore?”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“I would have happily been an asshole for thirty years in order to be wise for another fifty.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“We are who we are, right? There’s no point in pushing our personalities uphill.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“Of course we’re not talking about a Hollywood movie, Sam. We’re talking about your son’s life. But where do you think the three-act structure comes from? And why does it consistently speak to audiences? Because it’s an archetype. A universal pattern that recurs one generation after another. It’s not a coincidence that when the Sphinx poses her riddle to Oedipus, the answer is the three phases of man.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“We use the detailed profiles you’ve given us on yourselves to understand the environment in which your child will be raised. Then, by using those elements as a filter, we can identify within our proprietary database a significant cohort of people with a similar genetic makeup who were brought up in a similar environment and, based on their actual experiences, begin to anticipate—within a margin of acceptable error—the shape of the life that your child will lead.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“we are looking at aggregated biographic histories to predict individual biographic outcomes. Drawing from a wide array of sources, we’ve assembled a database on three generations of Americans that includes not only their gender and ethnicity but information on the environments in which they were raised—like their parents’ religions, educations, professions, and political identifications. Then we have traced how the lives of the subjects actually unfolded. By mapping the foundational information of this large population alongside their eventual experiences, we can start to identify meaningful patterns that help us clarify how nature and nurture have combined to shape the lives they’ve led.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“going to push a few into the forefront and a few into the background. We like to think of it as genetic nudging.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination

“our genes don’t merely express who we are. They contain all manner of talents from previous generations that we may not benefit from personally but that can be passed on to our progeny.”
― Amor Towles, You Have Arrived at Your Destination