Quotes from Adam Gopnik

we swim in our second language, we breathe in our first

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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.

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

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 looking for the lost half minute.

Wine grapes are as sensitive to assaults as authors.

compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma

Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life.

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.

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a scientific hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. Reason became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

We surf the waves of capitalism, from crest to trough and back again, but the funny thing is that no matter how often we ride the wave, nobody notices that it's wet. When we are on the crest, we believe that we have climbed a mountain through our own virtuous efforts, and when we are in the trough, we believe that we have fallen into a pit through out own vice.

We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.

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)

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.

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.

Smith believed not that markets make men free but that free men move toward markets. The difference is small but decisive; it is most of what we mean by humanism.

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Much of what feels like mastery in adult life is actually the avoidance of a challenge.

It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.

The point of eating is to slow down time

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 chômeurs . . .") 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 chômeurs, of whom Pierre, a pipe fitter, was a typical case . . .").