Adam Gopnik Quotes, Secret Quotes, Quality 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

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

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

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

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

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Years Quotes , Ingredients Quotes

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Silly Quotes , Simple Quotes

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wall Quotes , Block 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

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sex 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

We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and out of that wanting - well, everything else rises, good and bad. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Eye Quotes , Thinking 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults 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

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Water Quotes , Dinner 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

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee 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 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