Adam Gopnik Quotes, Thinking Quotes, People Quotes

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Mass Shootings Quotes

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Mind Quotes , Essentials Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Light Quotes , Paper Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Heart Quotes , Hands Quotes

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wall Quotes , Block 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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Player Quotes , Drawing Quotes

I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Practice 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

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults Quotes

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Reading Quotes , Pirate Quotes

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wine Quotes , Mean Quotes

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about - was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. [...] That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Fear Quotes , Real Quotes

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Rewards Quotes , Spinning Quotes

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Travel Quotes , Swim Quotes

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Faith Quotes , Art Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Brutality Quotes , Scandal Quotes

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Men 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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Past Quotes , Listening Quotes