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 GOPNIKThe relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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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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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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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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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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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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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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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK