# Rules of Civility Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [Amor Towles](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B004IYJDVG * ISBN: 0670022691 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYJDVG * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG) ## Highlights Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you’re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you. — location: [619](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=619) ^ref-46171 --- America may be the land of opportunity, but in New York it’s the shot at conformity that pulls them through the door. — location: [650](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=650) ^ref-4279 --- Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish. — location: [1155](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=1155) ^ref-40339 --- The soup was served. It was black bean with a spoonful of sherry. Maybe it was the sherry that Tinker and I had shared. If so, it was poetic justice for someone. But it was too soon to tell for whom. — location: [1334](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=1334) ^ref-61746 --- When I was lying in bed later that night alone and alert, with the corridors of my walk-up unusually quiet, the person foremost on my mind was Eve. For in the years preceding, if I had chanced onto the guest list of a dinner party like this one with all its temperate discord, and stayed out much too late for a school night, my one consolation would have been finding Eve, propped on her pillows, waiting to hear every last detail. — location: [1417](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=1417) ^ref-15261 --- —Till doomsday, she reminded me. —Till doomsday. — location: [1728](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=1728) ^ref-65228 --- It’s a bit of a cliché to refer to someone as a chameleon: a person who can change his colors from environment to environment. In fact, not one in a million can do that. But there are tens of thousands of butterflies: men and women like Eve with two dramatically different colorings—one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage—and which can be switched at the instant with a flit of the wings. — location: [1736](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=1736) ^ref-15677 --- Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice. Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements. — location: [1879](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=1879) ^ref-6038 --- But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn’t be hocked. — location: [2014](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=2014) ^ref-40163 --- Nathaniel Parish was a senior fiction editor at the Pembroke Press and something of a fixture. With a pitch-perfect ear for the nineteenth-century narrative sentence and a religious conviction that the novel should illuminate, he had been an early champion of the Russians and originated authoritative translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into English. Some say that he traveled all the way to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country homestead, just to discuss an ambiguous sentence in the closing paragraph of Anna Karenina. Parish had been a correspondent of Chekhov’s, a mentor of Wharton’s, a friend to Santayana and James. But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one—at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon. — location: [2156](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=2156) ^ref-23857 --- —Oh, I think you’re wrong. I think we all have some parcel of the past which is falling into disrepair or being sold off piece by piece. It’s just that for most of us, it isn’t an orchard; it’s the way we’ve thought about something, or someone. — location: [2180](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=2180) ^ref-3705 --- Pembroke was forty years behind the times. On my first day on the job I could tell that the editors at Pembroke were nothing like their younger counterparts around town. Not only did they have manners, they thought them worth preserving. They treated the opening of a door for a lady or the hand-scripted regret the way an archaeologist treats a fragment of pottery—with all the loving care that we normally reserve for things that matter. Terrance Taylor definitely wouldn’t have hailed a cab away from you in the rain; Beekman Canon wouldn’t have let the elevator door close as you approached; and Mr. Parish would never have raised his fork before you raised yours—he would sooner have starved. They certainly weren’t the sorts to hound out the “boldest” new voices, elbow their way into contracts and then mount a Times Square soapbox to advertise their authors’ artistic bravery. They were English public school professors who had misread the map in the tube and haplessly gotten off at the World of Commerce stop. — location: [2191](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=2191) ^ref-21103 --- Autumn in New York, Why does it seem so inviting? Autumn in New York, It spells the thrill of first-nighting.   Written by a Belarusian immigrant named Vernon Duke, “Autumn in New York” practically debuted as a jazz standard. Within fifteen years of its first being played, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald had all explored its sentimental bounds. Within twenty-five, there would be interpretations of the interpretations by Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Frank Sinatra, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson. The very question that the song asks of us about autumn, we could ask ourselves of the song: Why does it seem so inviting? Presumably, one factor is that each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city’s architectural, cultural, and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing each other on the thoroughfares feel an unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmastime in Vienna, or April in Paris. That’s the way we New Yorkers feel about fall. Come September, despite the waning hours, despite the leaves succumbing to the weight of gray autumnal rains, there is a certain relief to having the long days of summer behind us; and there’s a paradoxical sense of rejuvenation in the air.   Glittering crowds And shimmering clouds In canyons of steel— They’re making me feel I’m home.   It’s autumn in New York That brings the promise of new love.   Yes, in the autumn of 1938 tens of thousands of New Yorkers would be falling under the spell of that song. Sitting in the jazz bars or the supper clubs, the worn and the well-to-do would be nodding their heads in smiling acknowledgment that the Belarusian immigrant had it right: that somehow, despite the coming of winter, autumn in New York promises an effervescent romance which makes one look to the Manhattan skyline with fresh eyes and feel: It’s good to live it again. — location: [3018](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3018) ^ref-18828 --- Whatever their story, Eve was breathing easy now—for the moment forgetful, vulnerable, at peace. It’s a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that’s why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they’re fast asleep. — location: [3106](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3106) ^ref-62185 --- When a mother loses a daughter, she grieves over the future that her daughter will never have, but she can take solace in memories of close-knit days. But when your daughter runs away, it is the fond memories that have been laid to rest; and your daughter’s future, alive and well, recedes from you like a wave drawing out to sea. — location: [3195](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3195) ^ref-10024 --- There is an oft-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It’s a thrilling sentiment—one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides. — location: [3362](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3362) ^ref-31309 --- But there is another passage in Walden that has stayed with me as well. In it, Thoreau says that men mistakenly think of truth as being remote—behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the reckoning. When in fact, all these times and places and occasions are now and here. In a way, this celebration of the now and here seems to contradict the exhortation to follow one’s star. But it is equally persuasive. And oh so much more attainable. — location: [3365](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3365) ^ref-7106 --- I pulled Tinker’s sweater back on over my head, tiptoed down the hall, and stopped outside his room. I listened to the creaking of the house, to the rain on the roof, to the breathing on the other side of the door. Careful not to make a sound, I put a hand on the knob. In sixty seconds it was going to be the midpoint between the beginning and the end of time. And in that moment, there would be a chance to witness, to partake in, to succumb to the now and here. In exactly sixty seconds. Fifty. Forty. Thirty. On your mark Get set Go — location: [3369](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3369) ^ref-31415 --- At the back of the dining room two wide zinc doors swung to and fro, giving the clientele a direct view into the kitchen. It was so hectic it looked more like a village market than a commissary—complete with burlap sacks of rice piled on the floor and cleaver-wielding cooks holding live chickens by the throat. The well-to-do of New York were in love with the place. — location: [3441](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3441) ^ref-2543 --- And you better believe I remembered how subtle a partner Tinker had been in the Adirondacks—how clever; how inventive; how he had surprised me; how he had folded me; reversed me; explored me. Sweet Jesus. I wasn’t even close to being born yesterday, but not for one minute had I let myself dwell on the obvious—that he had learned all of that from someone else; someone a little more bold, a little more experienced, a little less subject to shame. — location: [3537](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3537) ^ref-13917 --- —Most people have more needs than wants. That’s why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs. — location: [3751](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3751) ^ref-5691 --- As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion—whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say. — location: [3762](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=3762) ^ref-20202 --- Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer. — location: [4027](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=4027) ^ref-54607 --- She was wearing jeans and a tight-fitting sweater, standing about ten feet tall. A new apartment with Grubb and a scaloppine mallet . . . —You’re on top of the world, I said, and I meant it. She just laughed and slugged me in the shoulder. —Cut the crap, Katey. —I’m serious. —Sort of, she said with a smile. Then she got all concerned like she’d offended me. —Hey. Don’t get me wrong. Nicer words were never said. But that doesn’t mean they aint crapola! I’m on the top of something, I guess, but it aint the world. We’re gonna get hitched and Grubb’s gonna paint and I’m gonna give him five kids and sagging tits. And I can’t wait! But the top of the world? That’s more in your line of work—And I’m counting on you getting there. — location: [4154](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=4154) ^ref-42156 --- As we sat there, dusk was falling and the lights of the city were coming on one by one in ways that even Edison hadn’t imagined. They came on across the great patchwork of office buildings and along the cables of the bridges; then it was the street lamps and the theater marquees, the headlights of the cars and the beacons perched atop the radio towers—each individual lumen testifying to some unhesitant intemperate collective aspiration. — location: [4338](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=4338) ^ref-16888 --- —The irony is that I loved that part of my life—when we lived near the shipyards. It was a ragtag neighborhood, and when school let out, we’d all run down to the docks. We didn’t know the batting averages; but we knew Morse code and the flags of the big shipping lines and we’d watch the crews coming down the gangplanks with their duffels over their shoulders. That’s what we all wanted to be when we grew up: merchant marines. We wanted to set sail on a freighter and make landfall in Amsterdam or Hong Kong or Peru. You look back with the benefit of age upon the dreams of most children and what makes them seem so endearing is their unattainability—this one wanted to be a pirate, this one a princess, this one president. But from the way Tinker talked you got the sense that his starry-eyed dreams were still within his reach; maybe closer than ever. — location: [4346](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=4346) ^ref-63674 --- He always looked his best, I thought to myself, when circumstances called for him to be a boy and a man at the same time. — location: [4380](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=4380) ^ref-30461 --- 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 without ever quite arriving. — location: [4519](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004IYJDVG&location=4519) ^ref-32319 ---