The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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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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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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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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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.
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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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.
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK