Quotes from Adam Gopnik

Art is a way of expanding our resonances, civilization our way of resonating to those expansions

The sign at Starbucks should read "Friends are like snowflakes: more different and beautiful each time you cross their path in our common descent." For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into every stranger and more complex patterns, until at las they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.

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.

Lewes and Eliot between them, someone has said, a little pretentiously but not wrongly, defined the liberalism of the oikos, the Greek word for home, whereas Trollope's is the liberalism of the polis, the city. Lewes and Eliot were more prescient of our own preoccupations: reform had to pass through the living room before it could move to Parliament.

There is a lovely term in botany-vernalization- referring to seeds that can only thrive in spring if they have been through the severity of winter. Without the stress of cold in a temperate climate, without the cycle of seasons, grapes would not be able to make ice wine. If we didn't remember winter in spring, it wouldn't be as lovely…We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no white keys.

What [Adam] Smith took from [David] Hume's demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.

What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Astérix-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.

Commentary by J.-P. Quélin, 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.)

J.-P. Quélin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.

Quote by Robert, a garçon 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.

An assault on an ideology is not merely different from a threat made to a person; it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people.

All the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it.

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.

History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners.

It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.

parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.

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.

When social spaces begin to be created outside the direct control of the state (including commercial ones, run for profit), civil society can start to flourish in unexpected ways. Learning just to sip alongside a stranger makes for a potable kind of pluralism.

No one single person needs to be a genius or a visionary or even a great artist for the result to be permanent and to transcend generations. In the same way, the clubs we make are collectively smarter than the people we are. Reason, like musicals, emerges from the meeting of many minds.

we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.

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.

confronted with a choice between the pollution of Maurras and the pollution of tourism, the intellectuals chose to remake the emptiness rather than abide with the many.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.