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?
ADAM GOPNIKAfter all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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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.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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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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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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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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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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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
ADAM GOPNIK