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d08668e
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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Adam Gopnik |
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7ce3032
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I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the "now," year after year."
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Adam Gopnik |
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66d7d3c
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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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humor
disney-world
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Adam Gopnik |
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a685afb
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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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Adam Gopnik |
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d2803ee
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
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Adam Gopnik |
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58190a2
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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, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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language
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Adam Gopnik |
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4602ca1
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There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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Adam Gopnik |
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354c9fd
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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, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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Adam Gopnik |
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c336753
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Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.
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Adam Gopnik |
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2f7ad56
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you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.
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Adam Gopnik |
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0bfe142
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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.
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Adam Gopnik |
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4f8e945
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This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.
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Adam Gopnik |
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2c2e473
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She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn saying, 'Take the pic-ture,' in Funny Face.
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Adam Gopnik |
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1bafccd
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The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.
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Adam Gopnik |
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6f18a0d
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I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it--a distant const..
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Adam Gopnik |
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ed133ef
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Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too--a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey--a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here yo..
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Adam Gopnik |
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d9f7328
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we swim in our second language, we breathe in our first
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Adam Gopnik |
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31690c2
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Can't repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, "the day of our life," Randall Jarrell called it."
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Adam Gopnik |
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450a14f
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We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. 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. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are ..
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Adam Gopnik |
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63682d1
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There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
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words
stories
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Adam Gopnik |
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0631766
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Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exult. They go back to their garden or kitchen or library -- or school -- and resume life. (as said by Mrs. Pearson)
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philosophical
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Adam Gopnik |
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b05526b
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We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.
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Adam Gopnik |
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6f93419
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Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization.
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Adam Gopnik |
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0df8cb1
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that people don't speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.
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Adam Gopnik |
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2206968
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There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish Room. They were both named Inez. And on that day Big Inez gave Little Inez a plantation all her own. Two thousand acres. Then her little sister came running in and said, "Grandmother, can I have a plantation too?" And Big Inez looked down and ..
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Adam Gopnik |
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31309d7
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67-If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry of another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you're given something to do that is time-consuming, ..
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mental-failure
exercise
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Adam Gopnik |
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cb85751
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The world was once haunted by Titus Oates's self-made epitaph: "I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The poetry of courage is replaced by the poetry of confinement, the art of the endless open channel overtaken by the art of the perpetually retold tale. Our successful withdrawal from the risks of winter makes for a lessening of its intensities. We h..
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Adam Gopnik |
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37cc54b
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There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory ... the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you're suppose to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. ..
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status
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Adam Gopnik |
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596c81a
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Commentary by J.-P. Quelin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This I think is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday we got fourteen -small- courses ... that made even the best of the old cuisine look like sludge.) /289
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criticism
cuisine
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Adam Gopnik |
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a06e243
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Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life.
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Adam Gopnik |
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e1be2aa
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It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.
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Adam Gopnik |
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fb139d0
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we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.
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Adam Gopnik |
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1bbd0f8
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In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation.
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Adam Gopnik |
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0d7ecee
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A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful--they are goddesses--and yet a man mu..
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Adam Gopnik |
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8b85998
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It is, I think, the journalist's vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: ("Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of chomeurs . . .") just as it is the scholar's vice to believe that all experience can be reduced to history ("The new world capitalist order produced a new class of chomeurs, of whom Pierre, a pipe fitter, was a typical case . . .")."
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Adam Gopnik |
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dee4758
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One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment ... Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government's tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an 'Anglo-Saxon' economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever. - 71
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work
free-market
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Adam Gopnik |
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e4df77a
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Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.
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Adam Gopnik |
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3446ce4
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The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. -109
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talk
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Adam Gopnik |
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b5f3301
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There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't.
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Adam Gopnik |
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7cc05b6
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The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijoteing together in the pot, and then--a specific moment--the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, be..
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Adam Gopnik |
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44ad782
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How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.
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Adam Gopnik |
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27abf51
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What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.
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Adam Gopnik |
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cb5b8a8
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What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to afficher erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper.
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Adam Gopnik |
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3e62008
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The real "crisis" in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they're really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is..
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Adam Gopnik |