Adam Gopnik Quotes, Autumn Quotes, Light 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

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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

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

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Two Quotes

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Father Quotes , Writing 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

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loyalty Quotes , Past Quotes

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loneliness Quotes , Feelings 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

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Winning 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

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , America Quotes , People Quotes

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Kids Quotes

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Light Quotes , Paper Quotes

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Giving Quotes

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Attitude Quotes , Party 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Heart Quotes , Hands Quotes

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Innovation Quotes , Scarcity 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes