Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
ADAM GOPNIKIn bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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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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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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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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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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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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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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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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIK