Adam Gopnik Quotes, Sweet Quotes, Strong Quotes

Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sweet Quotes , Strong Quotes

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Secret Quotes , Quality Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas Quotes

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Regret Quotes , Joy Quotes

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Mean Quotes

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Past Quotes , Listening Quotes

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

... a fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Photography Quotes , Sleep Quotes

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults Quotes

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Autumn Quotes , Light Quotes

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Water Quotes , Dinner Quotes

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Good Times Quotes

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Behaviour Quotes , Tables Quotes

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Cooking Quotes , Sides Quotes

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Player Quotes , Drawing Quotes

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Magic Quotes , Mind Quotes

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Coffee Quotes

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Trying Quotes , Stories Quotes