Paris to the Moon

I've been reading "Paris to the Moon" by Adam Gopnik. It's a story about the author and his family who decide to leave New York to live in Paris for several years. So much of the book explains in words better than I can form what I've been experiencing. Here are a few of my favourite excerpts:

"Paris...looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore it's heart on it's sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting."

"What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and impersonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience."

"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."

"The odd thing in making a big move is the knowledge that your life will be composed of hundreds of small things that you will arrive at only by trial and error, and that for all the strikes and seminars you attend, the real flavor of life will be determined, shaped, by these things."

"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."

"There is the feeling of being apart and the feeling of being a universe apart-the immigrant's strange knowledge that the language and lore that carry on in your own living space are so unlike the ones right outside."

"...because language remains in place, and it remains hard. Even after two years of speaking French all the time, I feel it. We breath in our first language, and swim in our second."

"Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again."

"The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things."