Quotes from Paris to the Moon

“We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“...you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they’re your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o’clock when you’re walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river–only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still…–you feel as if you’ve escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they’re transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven’t seen before, either. It’s true that you can’t run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn saying, 'Take the pic-ture,' in Funny Face.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“we swim in our second language, we breathe in our first”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That’s the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful—they are goddesses—and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser’s name? Paris. C’est normal.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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 . . .”).”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijotéing together in the pot, and then—a specific moment—the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, bend from raw to cooked. The chestnuts, if you’re doing chestnuts, turn a little damp, a little weepy. That’s what they do; everything weeps.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“The real “crisis” in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they’re really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is likely to feel at home in the other bits. You can join this global community by speaking English yourself, but that’s about all. The space between the average Frenchman (or Italian or German) and the average American is just as great as it’s ever been, because language remains in place, and it remains hard. Even after two years of speaking French all the time, I feel it. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who’s called Hal—like Falstaff’s prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al—Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. “But what shall I say to Hal—that I have never loved him?” Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, “Et Al—qu’est-ce que je vais lui dire?”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

“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, quote from Paris to the Moon

“...we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.”
― Adam Gopnik, quote from Paris to the Moon

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