Adam Gopnik Quotes, Fear Quotes, Real 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Fear Quotes , Real 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

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.

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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

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 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

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Men 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

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , New York Quotes , Coffee 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Father Quotes , Writing 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

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Thinking 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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

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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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Mean Quotes

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Magic Quotes , Mind Quotes

If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sides 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

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Sex Quotes , Writing Quotes