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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a88157b | parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| c7c3a2c | 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. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| c360584 | The great teachers know. The truly great ones don't care whether you believe in their teachings or not. They present a truth, then leave you with yourself to discover your own truth. Adam Gopnik | Mark Wolynn | ||
| f267d02 | Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| e3f9088 | There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f8291e2 | sometimes crazy uncles--from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f6f21f7 | feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma, | Adam Gopnik | ||
| bbcaa63 | 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 | talk-the-game | Adam Gopnik | |
| 8a171a1 | Inogda on ko mne zagliadyvaet i oret, tochno ia glukhoi. Tak s inostrantsami govoriat anglichane, ubezhdennye, chto, esli orat', ikh srazu poimut. Stranno, ia kak budto videl sebia so storony, slovno eto moia dusha otdelilas' ot tela i vosparila k nebesam. S vyshiny ia videl sebia, zhenu i syna, sidevshikh podle brennykh ostankov moego priemnogo ottsa i dumal: v kakoi udivitel'noi sem'e ia vyros i s kakoi neobychnoi sem'ei kogda-nibud' ras.. | John Boyne | ||
| 8413cf7 | 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. .. | status | Adam Gopnik | |
| bcf31cd | The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f229910 | 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... | status | Adam Gopnik | |
| d339370 | Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics, anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. ~ 219 | soccer | Adam Gopnik | |
| 5581ef4 | Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. /225 | soccer | Adam Gopnik | |
| 034fd8e | 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.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| d52ef22 | _Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. /275 | Adam Gopnik | ||
| afdf539 | 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 | buy-sell | Adam Gopnik | |
| b137084 | 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 | politics | Adam Gopnik | |
| 88a9eba | J.-P. Quelin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.' /289 | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 8272e60 | 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 | life lucidity crisis | Adam Gopnik | |
| bb4a62d | compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma, | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 88752ff | ask always what's the best real possibility, not what's the ultimate ideal imagining. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f759d89 | I never promised I would write the truth. I | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 08c25ee | If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| c9de196 | In the modern computer, software has developed in such a way as to fill this role of go-between. On one end you have the so-called end user who wants to be able to order up a piece of long division, say, simply by supplying two numbers to the machine and ordering it to divide them. At the other end stands the actual computer, which for all its complexity is something of a brute. It can perform only several hundred basic operations, and long.. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| fa7d74b | In the sixties there was proposed a "National Data Bank," which would, theoretically, improve the government's efficiency by allowing agencies to share information. The fact that such a system could be abused did not mean it would be, proponents said; it could be constructed in such a way as to guarantee benign use. Nonsense, said opponents, who managed to block the proposal; no matter what the intent or the safeguards, the existence of suc.. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 80e8351 | He recites the names of the trees, vines, shrubs, flowers that he's planted here over the years. I count about forty different species. Finally, in the dim light from the patio, he studies a new fern that has just come up. "It's just vibrant and happy and healthy. The way a patient should be." | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 01f5445 | Dokte Paul works with both hands" -- that is, both with science and with the magic necessary to remove ensorcellments." | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 0bf80ec | Farmer liked to tell his Harvard students that to be a good clinician you must never let a patient know that you have problems too, or that you're in a hurry. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 7c5683c | Beyond mountains there are mountains." - Haitian proverb" | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 915326b | The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 2d84391 | I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen," West said years later. "There's some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understand how things get put together. Even if you can't under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together." | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 73aa8ec | In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| a53a4d9 | It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But | Tracy Kidder | ||
| bae2802 | He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist. | memory | Tracy Kidder | |
| 6d98e14 | One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given moment. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| 25c84a2 | At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The | Tracy Kidder | ||
| a30e263 | abject | Tracy Kidder | ||
| ac09c1e | Roughly one-third of the planet already lived in chronic poverty, according to United Nations statistics. Farmer pointed out that through the spread of disease, illiteracy, and consumption of resources by the poor, prosperous first-world countries would increasingly be affected--unless they scaled back on their own use of resources and brought education and health care to the poor. In his speeches, Farmer liked to talk about "the nation of .. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| c5f1e5a | The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains," which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next." | Tracy Kidder | ||
| d1d186d | The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains," which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next. The view of the Peligre Dam and its immense lake and the land it had drowned was, so to speak, another mountain to Farmer. It was a story of exploitation and disaster for at least a hundred thousand Haitians, and in one way or another, Farmer had to.. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| dd5c5ee | To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill," he announced in a light tone as we studied the view together. But there was a serious point to his words. The sight of the drowned farmland, the result of a dam that had made his patients some of the poorest on this earth, was Farmer's lens on the world. Look through it and you could s.. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| eef5677 | EVERY ADULT IS shaped by the experience of childhood and adolescence. | Tracy Kidder | ||
| f3beab6 | megalomaniacal. | Tracy Kidder |