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

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

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

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

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Joy 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Faith Quotes , Art 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Fear Quotes , Real 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

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Practice 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loneliness Quotes , Feelings Quotes

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Skeletons Quotes

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Stars Quotes , Rocks 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

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

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Men Quotes , People 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 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Mean 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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Innovation Quotes , Scarcity 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Behaviour Quotes , Tables Quotes