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?
ADAM GOPNIKMaking an idea into an emotion.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.
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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
ADAM GOPNIK