TOWLES, Amor - A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION

Prosecutor Vyshinsky: State your name.

Rostov: Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt.

Vyshinsky: You may have your titles; they are of no use to anyone else. But for the record, are you not Alexander Rostov, born in St. Petersburg, 24 October 1899?

Pg. 3

Vyshinsky: And you write poetry?

Rostov: I have been known to fence with a quill.

Vyshinsky: [Holding up a pamphlet] Are you the author of this long poem of 1913: Where Is It Now?

Rostov: It has been attributed to me.

Vyshinsky: Why did you write the poem?

Rostov: It demanded to be written. I simply happened to be sitting at the particular desk on the particular morning when it chose to make its demands.

Pg.4

Rostov: All poetry is a call to attention.

Pg. 4

"Thank you gentlemen, for delivering me safely. I shall no longer be in need of your assistance."

Pg. 9

The two young men met the Count's gaze with looks of embarrassment, having clearly been conscripted into some duty they found distasteful.

Pg. 10

"And the rest?"

Becomes the property of the people."

Pg. 11

"This.  That.  Those.  All the books."

Among the furnishings destined for his new quarters, the Count chose two high back chairs, his grandfather's Oriental coffee table, and his favorite set of porcelain plates. He chose the two table lamps fashioned from ebony elephants and the portrait of his sister, Helena, which Serov had painted during a brief stay at Idlehour date 1908. He did not forget the leather case that had been fashioned especially for him by Asprey in London and which his good friend Mishka had so appropriately christened the Ambassador.

Pg. 11

'Tis a funny thing reflected the Count as he stood ready to abandon his suite. From the earliest age, we must learn to say goodbye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the station; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry, or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly grabbing a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we were here word of him soon enough.

That experience is less likely to teach us how to put our dearest possessions adieu. And if we were to? We wouldn't welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our there is possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, at considerable expense and inconvenience; we danced and publish their services and reprimand children were playing too roughly in their vicinity - all the while allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, this very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing.

And so, slipping his sister's scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever.

Pg. 14

Adversity presents itself in many forms; and that if a man does not master his circumstances that he is bound to be mastered by them.

Pg. 18

But imagining what might happen if one's circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.

Pg. 20

For the books we're not even to the Count's taste. His personal library of majestic narratives by the likes of Balzac, Dickens, and Tolstoy had been left behind in Paris. The books the bellhops had lugged to the attic had been his father's and, devoted as they were just two days of rational philosophy and the science of modern agriculture, each promised heft and threatened impenetrability.

Pg. 22

But in a period of abundance any half-wit with a spoon can please a palate.

Pg. 26

Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds have flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one's friends had no desire to venture in.

Pg. 30

It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with a peek of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond...

Pg. 32

How many times had he watched as a young beauty turned thirty degrees before her mirror to ensure that she saw herself to the best advantage?  (As if henceforth all the world would see her solely from that angle!)

Pg. 36

"Have you ever known a princess?"

"I have known many princesses."

Her eyes widened further, then narrowed.

"Was it terribly hard to be a princess?"

"Terribly."

Pg. 41

For if a room that exists under the governance, authority, and intent of others seems smaller than it is, then a room that exists in secret can, regardless of its dimensions, seem as fast as one cares to imagine.

Pg. 64

Fate would not have the reputation that has if it simply did what it seemed it would do.

Pg. 80

While the splendors that elude us in youth are likely to receive our casual contempt in adolescence and our measured consideration in adulthood, they forever hold us in their thrall.

Pg. 80

"What is to become of you, Alexander?"

But when Helena asked the, she did so as if the answer were a genuine mystery. As if, despite her brother's erratic studies and carefree ways, the world had yet to catch a glimpse of the man he was bound to become.

Pg. 83

Standing in formal configuration, the Japanese and Russian delegates all wore high white collars, moustaches, bow ties, and expressions suggestive of some grand sense of accomplishment - having just concluded with the stoke of a pen the war that their likes had started in the first place.

Pg. 84

"You know me better than anyone," she said after a moment. "I shall treasure them to my dying day."

Pg. 94

Even men in the most trying of circumstances - like those lost at sea or confined to prison - will find the means to carefully account the passing of a year.

Pg. 109

It provides an occasion to reflect on the inevitable progress of the world they left behind

Pg. 110

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration - and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with him in every possible setting at every possible hour.

Pg. 120

Now when a man has been underestimated by a friend he has some cause for taking offense - since it is our friends who should overestimate our capacities. They should have an exaggerated opinion of our moral fortitude, our aesthetic sensibilities, and our intellectual scope. Why, they should practically imagine us leaping through a window in the nick of time with the works of Shakespeare in one hand and a pistol in the other!

Pg. 134

As we age, we are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade. We are familiar with the songs our grandparents favored, after all, even though we never danced to them ourselves. At festive holidays, the recipes we pull from the drawer are routinely decades-old, and in some cases even written in the hand of a relative long since dead.

Pg. 144

Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress - any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leap frog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have lingered for decades.

Pg. 144

Whether they favored the unflinching hand of the Old Testament, or the more forgiving the hand of the New, their submission to the will of God help them to understand, at least accept the inescapable course of events.

Pg. 146

But when a man's country is dismissed so offhandedly, he cannot hide behind his preferences or his appointments - especially when he has drunk a bottle of White and a snifter of brandy. So, having sketched a quick instruction for Andrius on the back of a napkin and tucked it under a one-ruble note, the Count cleared his throat.

Pg. 156

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in the river on a map: There it was, he says.

The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow.

Pg. 173

 As with any sewing circle since the beginning of time the two in this one we're accustomed to sharing observations from their day as they stitched. Most of these observations were met with a Hmm, or an Is that so? without a break in the rhythm of the work; but occasionally, some item that warranted greater attention would bring the stitching to a stop.

Pg. 188

It's true that we argued about ideas, Marina, but we never had any intention of doing anything about them.

Pg. 189

"You don't know who I am?"

I know you are a man that can secure need if the Boyarsky's private rooms in which to dine alone while a behemoth waits at the door."

Pg. 207

But a Gentleman would have served his guest before he served himself.

A gentleman wouldn't gesture at another man with his fork, or speak with his mouth full. But perhaps more importantly, he would have introduced himself at the beginning of a conversation - particularly when he had the advantage over his guest.

Pg. 210

There are many reasons for ordering a particular bottle of wine. And memories of home are among the best.

Pg. 210

As both a student of history and a man devoted to living in the present, I admit that I do not spend a lot of time imagining how things might otherwise have been. But I do like to think there's a difference between being assigned to situation and reconciled to it.

Pg. 211

Where is it now...?  Perhaps in your blue pagota... Very witty, I m sure, coming from a man who couldn't rhyme cow with plow.

Pg. 219

In an instant the Count could see that the chef was in rosy form. Having sensed at two that all might not be lost, at half past midnight the chef hadn't the slightest doubt that the sun would shine tomorrow, that most people were generous at heart, and that, when all was said and done, things tended to work out for the best.

Pg. 219

To concede that in all likelihood he was the least fitting, least well-equipped, and most poorly situated man in Moscow to care for a child. Had he the time and presence of mind to weigh all of this, would have denied Nina her request?

Pg. 235

She had simultaneously brought the ceiling downward, the floor upward, and the walls inward, such that anywhere he hoped to move she was already there. Having roused himself from a fitful night on the floor, when the Count was ready for his morning calisthenics, she was standing in the calisthenics spot. ... And when, at last, he was ready to leave back in his chair with his book, she was already sitting in it, staring up at him expectantly.

Pg. 240

The Count's father believed that while a man should attend closely to life, he should not attend too closely to the clock. A student of both the Stoics and Montaigne, the Count's father believed that our Creator had set aside the morning hours for industry. That is, if a man woke no later than six, engaged in a light repast, and then applied himself without interruption, by the hour of noon he should have accomplished a full day's labor.

Thus, in his father's view, the toll of twelve was a moment of reckoning. When the noon bell sounded, the diligent man could take pride in having made good use of the morning and sit down to his lunch with a clear conscience. But when it sounded for the frivolous man - the man who had squandered his morning in bed, or on breakfast with three papers, or on idle chatter in the sitting room, hh had no choice but to ask for his Lord's forgiveness.

In the afternoon, the Count's father believed that a man should take care not to live by the watch in his waistcoat - marking the minutes as if the events of one's life were stations on a railway line. Rather, having been suitably industrious before lunch, he should spend his afternoon and wise liberty. That is, he should walk among the willows, read a timeless text, converse with a friend beneath the pergola, or reflect before the fire - engaging in those endeavors that have no appointed hour, and that dictate their own beginnings and ends.

And the second chime?

The Count's father was of the mind that one should never hear it. If one had lived one's day well - in the service of industry, liberty, and the Lord - one should be sound asleep long before twelve. So the second chime of the twice-tolling clock was most definitely a remonstrance. What are you doing up?  it was meant to say. Were you so profligate with your daylight that you must hunt about for things to do in the dark?

Pg. 244

To that end tonight on the table besides their nearly empty plates were two copies of Alexis de Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America. Osip have been somewhat intimidated by its length, but the Count had assured him that there was no better text with which to establish a fundamental understanding of American culture.

Pg. 258

And you shall hear what I think without fail. But as your tutor, I would be remiss were I to skew your impressions before you had the chance to formulate them yourself. So let's begin with the freshness of your thoughts.

Pg. 259

But it had been the Count's experience that men prone to pace are always on the verge of acting impulsively.

Pg. 265

Perhaps it is inescapable that when our lives are in flux, despite the comfort of our beds, we are bound to keep ourselves awake grappling with anxieties - no matter how great or small, how real or imagined.

Pg. 268

They had created the poetry of silence.

Pg. 269

Columns of smoke rose above the Kremlin walls from the bonfires of classified files,

Pg. 275

For hours on end she sat in that very chair memorizing capitals, conjugating verbs, and solving for x or y. With an equal sense of dedication she studied her sewing with Marina and her sauces with Emile.

Pg. 282

...like so many others have been tried and sentenced in the name of article 58.

Pg. 287

"Are you teaching...?" the Count asked tentatively.

"No," Mishka said with a shake of the head. "We are not encouraged to read or write. We are hardly encouraged to eat."

Pg. 288

We turn the gun on ourselves, not because we are more indifferent and less cultured than the British, or the French, or the Italians. On the contrary. We are prepared to destroy that which we have created because we believe more than any of them in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person.

Pg. 291

For with cinema, the Yanks had apparently discovered how to placate the entire working class at the cost of a nickel a week.

Pg. 293

There are no more sympathetic souls than strangers.

Pg. 301

How did he spend the ensuing minutes? Would any man spend them?

He prayed for the first time since childhood. He allowed himself to imagine the worst, then assured himself that everything would be all right, reviewing the surgeons few remarks over and over.

Pg. 308

Rather than tucking in blankets and buttoning up coats, we must have faith in them to tuck and button on their own. And if they fumble with her newfound liberty, we must remain composed, generous, judicious. We must encourage them to venture out from under watchful gaze, and then sigh with pride when they pass at last through the revolving door of life...

Pg. 322

One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression - the alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play.

Pg. 325

It was Chopin, Opus 9, number 2, in E-flat major.

Pg. 325

"But I must say, your sense of space is particularly exquisite."

The stranger smiled a little wistfully.

"That's because I'm an architect by training, not an artist."

Pg. 329

I can tell you from personal experience that the majority of hotel restaurants - not simply in Russia, you understand, but across Europe - were designed for and have served the guests of the hotel. But this restaurant wasn't and hasn't. It was designed to be and has been a gathering place for the entire city of Moscow. ... For most of the last forty years, on a typical Saturday night you could find Russians cut from every cloth crowded around that fountain, stumbling into conversations with whosoever happened to be at the neighboring table. Naturally, this has led to impromptu romances and heartfelt debates.

Pg. 331

These two would have felt like old friends had they been just hours before. To some degree, this was because they were kindred spirits - finding ample evidence of common ground and cause for laughter in the midst of effortless conversation; but it was also almost certainly a matter of upbringing.

Pg. 333

Player One proposes a category encompassing a specialized subset phenomena such as stringed instruments, or famous islands, or winged creatures other than birds. The two players then go back and forth until one of them fails to come up with a fitting example in a suitable interval of time.

Pg. 339

As the Count walked down the hallway, he could not help but observe to himself that there was a time, not long before, when a gentleman could expect a measure of privacy in his personal affairs. With reasonable confidence, he could place his correspondence in a desk drawer and leave his diary in a bedside table.

Pg. 344

For it is a role of the parent to express his concerns and then take three steps back.

Pg. 358

For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sophia - that extraordinary blessing that had struck him from the blue - when Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich died, there went the last of those who had known him as a younger man. Though, as Katerina had so rightly observed, at least he remained to remember.

Pg. 374

As the Bishop inserted this improvement into Emile's menu, the chef cast a furious glance across the table at the man he now referred to as Count Blabbermouth.

Pg. 381