A Gentleman In Moscow Quotes
"It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations."
"I have lived under the impression that a man’s purpose is known only to God."
"What a marvel it had been to discover the table that folded away without a trace."
"But imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness."
"A king fortifies himself with a castle, a gentleman with a desk."
"Manners are not like bonbons, Nina. You may not choose the ones that suit you best; and you certainly cannot put the half-bitten ones back in the box."
"I understand that a princess should say please if she is asking for a cake, because she is trying to convince someone to give her the cake."
"But just as important, a careful accounting of days allows the isolated to note that another year of hardship has been endured; survived; bested."
"Whether they have found the strength to persevere through a tireless determination or some foolhardy optimism, those 365 hatch marks stand as proof of their indomitability."
"For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years."
"An understandable conclusion, but I should think the best-bred dogs belong in the surest hands."
"For if patience wasn't so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue."
"After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel?"
"By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration."
"If offering Mishka the banquette had been gracious and opportune, it also had the added benefit of keeping him in his seat."
"But while each one of these surprises inspires a new state of wonder, nothing can compare to the awe one experiences when at one in the morning a woman rolling on her side utters unambiguously: 'As you go, be sure to draw the curtains.'"
"Despite the fact that the cat had a decisive lead and knew every nook and cranny of the hotel’s upper floors, once the dogs regained their footing, they charged across the lobby in full chorus with every intention of mounting the stairs."
"But the Hotel Metropol was not a hunting ground. It was a residence par excellence, an oasis for the worn and weary."
"For just as the wolfhounds registered the cat’s reversal and attempted to turn, the lobby’s expansive oriental carpet came to an end, and the dogs’ momentum sent them skidding across the marble floor into the luggage of an arriving guest."
"What is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleaguered in the middle of the night."
"And the objects in our homes? The oriental coffee tables and well-worn desks that have been handed down from generation to generation? Despite being 'out of fashion,' not only do they add beauty to our daily lives, they lend material credibility to our presumption that the passing of an era will be glacial."
"Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest."
"Anyone who has spent an hour drinking vodka by the glass knows that size has surprisingly little to do with a man’s capacity."
"At one time, I was Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov—recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt."
"But when you exile a man into his own country, there is no beginning anew."
"As long as there have been men on earth, reflected the Count, there have been men in exile."
"To Helena Rostov, the flower of Nizhny Novgorod."
"All these years, they must have been listening to us."
"With what charm and elegance they moved among the patrons of the bar."
"The foreign press corps had a standing wager of ten American dollars."
"Ever so slightly, Audrius raised an eyebrow."
"Music that rewarded patience and attention with crescendos and diminuendos."
"Like the American correspondents, jazz seemed a naturally gregarious force."
"The nut of the problem was that, despite the overall improvement in the general availability of goods."
"The chef's cheeks, neck, and ears took on a purple of such moral indignation."
"For one must admit, there was something genuinely comic about the circumstances."
"It was just a matter of a few sentences. Fifty words out of a few hundred thousand."
"An authoritative collection of Chekhov’s letters was long overdue."
"It promised to inspire a whole new generation of scholars and students, readers and writers."
"You arrived on the overnight train and missed your lunch. That’s half the problem right there."
"Silence can be an opinion. Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival."
"But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions."
"We Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created."
"We turn the gun on ourselves not because we are more indifferent and less cultured."
"But because we believe more than any of them in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person."
"We have not burned Moscow to the ground for the last time."
"The skull was designed to withstand a certain amount of rough treatment."
"The notion that a child so composed would conspire to the releasing of geese was simply preposterous."
"One can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed."
"For here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in a time of war."
"Having been stripped of their identities, henceforth the zeks—though millions in number—would move in perfect unison."
"The landscape is not as beautiful as one remembered it."
"No bleat of the trumpet, no clink of the glass, no sight of a young woman’s knee for him."
"Sweep on, street sweepers! Sweep until the cobblestones of Russia glitter like gold!"
"He has been allotted a vicarious life—a life in which all experiences are at arm’s length, all sensations secondhand."
"In fact, so successful was the campaign to contain awareness of the crisis, when word leaked out that millions were starving in Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the lead correspondent for The New York Times in Russia, would report that these rumors of famine were grossly exaggerated."
"So ingenious was the design of these new apartment buildings, so intuitive their architecture, they could be built from a single page of specifications—regardless of which way the page was oriented!"
"Like bottles of wine, two men will differ radically from each other for being born a year apart or on neighboring hills."