Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIKAmericans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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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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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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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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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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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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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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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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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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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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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK






