It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
ADAM GOPNIKIt was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?
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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
ADAM GOPNIK






