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9333421
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The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small--to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways--to get it.
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Adam Gopnik |
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dbc5723
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There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal--like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so thro..
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Adam Gopnik |
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a88157b
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parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.
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Adam Gopnik |
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c7c3a2c
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Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm--up too early, asleep too soon--to place you on a margin, and to the essential joy--just the three of us!--was added the essential loneliness, just the three of us.
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Adam Gopnik |
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f267d02
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Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.
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Adam Gopnik |
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e3f9088
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There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what
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Adam Gopnik |
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f8291e2
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sometimes crazy uncles--from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.
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Adam Gopnik |
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f6f21f7
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feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma,
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Adam Gopnik |
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bbcaa63
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I understand why people play [soccer]. ... I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking--tidy talking. I suppose you'd have to call it. If you did something good, it was brilliant; something less than brilliant was useless; if all of you were useless together, you were rubbish; and if a person did something brilliant that nonetheless became useless, everyone cried, 'Oh, unlucky!' - 216
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talk-the-game
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Adam Gopnik |
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8413cf7
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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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bcf31cd
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The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.
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Adam Gopnik |
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f229910
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There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter 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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d339370
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Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics, anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. ~ 219
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soccer
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Adam Gopnik |
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5581ef4
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Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. /225
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soccer
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Adam Gopnik |
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034fd8e
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In Paris restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Laperouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overlooked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd's biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoit, Aux Assassins) are places..
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Adam Gopnik |
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d52ef22
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_Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. /275
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Adam Gopnik |
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afdf539
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I suppose we couldn't realize, or could realize but couldn't accept, that the logic of business is not a logic in that sense. It's not only a narrow consideration of profits and losses, but a larger logic of, well, appetite. To buy something is to assert oneself, and to sell it, for whatever reason, is to collaborate in one's own diminishment. /279
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buy-sell
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Adam Gopnik |
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b137084
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We had moved in a single November night from ideology to politics--from what you _want_ to what you do--with the usual disappointing results. /284
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politics
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Adam Gopnik |
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88a9eba
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J.-P. Quelin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.' /289
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Adam Gopnik |
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8272e60
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Quote by Robert, a garcon who accepted a 'fat envelope' to leave the Balzar: Anyway it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves--though only after the crisis is over. Still, that's enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that is was _our choice._ We made it. We _chose_ to leave. /293
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life
lucidity
crisis
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Adam Gopnik |
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bb4a62d
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compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma,
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Adam Gopnik |
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88752ff
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ask always what's the best real possibility, not what's the ultimate ideal imagining.
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Adam Gopnik |
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3d25d21
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There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them.
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Adam Gopnik |
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a6da74f
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Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once.
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Adam Gopnik |