Adam Gopnik Quotes, Men Quotes, People 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

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: 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." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sex Quotes , Writing Quotes

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. 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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Silly Quotes , Simple Quotes

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loyalty Quotes , Past Quotes

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

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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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

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

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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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Practice Quotes

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

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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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Years Quotes , Ingredients Quotes

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, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Distance Quotes , Believe Quotes

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. 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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Mass Shootings Quotes

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 think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

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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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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. 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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Men Quotes

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - 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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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Attitude Quotes , Party Quotes