Janet

“Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace