Katrina Li

“one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression - that 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.

Whatever personal sense of heartache Chopin had hoped to express through this little composition - whether it had been prompted by a loss of love, or simply sweet anguish one feels when witnessing a mist on a meadow in the morning - it was right there, ready to be experienced to its fullest, in the ballroom of the Hotel Metropol one hundred years after the composer's death. But how, the question remained, could a seventeen-year-old girl achieve this feat of expression, if not by channeling a sense of loss and longing of her own?”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow