The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
ADAM GOPNIKThere 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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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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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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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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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 more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
ADAM GOPNIK