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.
ADAM GOPNIKProtein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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.
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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
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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 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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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 World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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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 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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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK