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
ADAM GOPNIKIf we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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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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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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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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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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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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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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK