Adam Gopnik Quotes, Book Quotes, Kids 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

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Education Quotes , Art Quotes

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart 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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Rewards Quotes , Spinning Quotes

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

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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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Men Quotes

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Song 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

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

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Men 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

... 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

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Drawing Quotes , Shapes 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wine 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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Mind Quotes , Essentials 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

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , People Quotes , World Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Distance Quotes , Believe Quotes