Adam Gopnik Quotes, Travel Quotes, Swim Quotes

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Travel Quotes , Swim Quotes

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Coffee Quotes

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? 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; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Men Quotes , People Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Years Quotes , Ingredients Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Photography Quotes , Sleep Quotes

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wine Quotes , Mean Quotes

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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loneliness Quotes , Feelings Quotes

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Bookstores Quotes , Stuff Quotes

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults Quotes

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...

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Kids Quotes

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

6 years ago

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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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Reading Quotes , Pirate Quotes

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Heart Quotes , Hands Quotes