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Book: Paris to the Moon
Quotes of Book: Paris to the Moon
TOP TAGS :nonconformitytennessee-williamsgraciousnessthe-new-yorkerwordsworthobstacleshorrorcontemplation

  1. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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. /293
    book-quotelifecrisislucidity

  2. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    J.-P. Quélin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.' /289
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  3. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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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  4. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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
    book-quotebuy-sell

  5. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    _Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. /275
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  6. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    In Paris restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Lapérouse, 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. Benoît, Aux Assassins} are places where you can go to dinner tonight. Some of Liebling's joints are still in business too: the Beaux-Arts, the Pierre à la Place Gaillon, the Closerie des Lilas.
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  7. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. /225
    book-quotesoccer

  8. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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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  9. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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 Télecom 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. ... My trouble is that I think like a Frenchman: I transform every encounter into a competition in status and get enraged when I lose it. –100
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  10. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.
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  11. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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 Télecom 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. ... My trouble is that I think like a Frenchman: I transform every encounter into a competition in status and get enraged when I lose it. –100
    book-quotestatus

  12. Adam Gopnik _ Paris to the Moon

    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
    book-quotetalk-the-game
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