We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
ADAM GOPNIKWe call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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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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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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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
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The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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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 past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK