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 GOPNIKWe breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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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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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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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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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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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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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 think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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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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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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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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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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 scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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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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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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