Quotes from Adam Gopnik

Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.

There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what

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 have all gone inside, and may be some time.

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.

sometimes crazy uncles—from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton.

feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma

The real national dish of the French right now-the cheap available food-is couscous. But North African cooking remains segregated in couscous parlours and has not been brought into the main current. A fossilised metropolitan tradition, yet what took its place was a sentimental nationalism.

Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.

ask always what's the best real possibility, not what's the ultimate ideal imagining.

The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another.

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!

Liberals think it to be for the welfare of the people and the good of the country that distances should be reduced and gradually annihilated." "Gradually annihilated"—it's a stronger term than it may seem.

The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.

Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics, anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius.

Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick.

That's right: No one cares! People have troubles of their own! It's okay. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; it means you should do it, somehow, for its own sake, without illusions. Just write, just live, and don't care too much yourself. No one cares. It's just banter.

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't.

_Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds.

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.

Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of timeless winter, of eternal winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside of our dailiness, the snow as nature's secret…we could lose the polar icecaps but would not stop hearing winter music.

Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.

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.

How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.

A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an cabin, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.