29 quotes found
“There are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.”
“Im willing to be under anything, she said, as long as it isnt somebodys thumb.”
“...but the tenure of friendships has never been governed by the passage of time.”
“I’m willing to be under anything, she said, as long as it isn’t somebody’s thumb.”
“That's the problem with living in New York. You've got no New York to run away to.”
“History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair.”
“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 revisionswe draw a card, and we must decide right then and ...”
“But the Count hadnt the temperament for revenge; he hadnt the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadnt the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstanc...”
“But of course, the Count also wept for himself. For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sofia - that extraordinary blessing that had struck ...”
“When one turns seventeen and begins to experience that first period of real independence, one's senses are so alert, one's sentiments so finely attuned that every conversation, every look, every la...”
“Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all th...”
“If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us...then there wouldn't be so much fuss about love in the first place.”
“Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progressany combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwis...”
“For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life ...”
“Ever since [that day], a small uncertainty had buzzed between us.It was a sense of chemistry that had been a little elusive, a little imprecise, until now.”
“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 determinat...”
“But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of...”
“Katey's the hottest bookworm you'll ever meet. If you took all the books that she's read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.”
“For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that ...”
“To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?”
“If they (ghosts) wander the halls of night, it is not from a grievance with or envy of the living. Rather, it is because they have no desire to see the living at all. Any more than snakes hope to s...”
“In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.”
