Adam Gopnik Quotes, Eye 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Eye Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Choices Made Quotes , Mind Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Drawing Quotes , Shapes 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Mean 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Autumn Quotes , Light Quotes

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Regret Quotes , Joy Quotes

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Cooking Quotes , Sides 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Winning 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Mind Quotes , Essentials Quotes

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Coffee 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Behaviour Quotes , Tables Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Brutality Quotes , Scandal Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Rewards Quotes , Spinning 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Joy Quotes

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Bookstores Quotes , Stuff 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Accomplishment Quotes , Adults 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Photography Quotes , Sleep Quotes

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution - perhaps the first modern political institution.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Hangover Quotes , Believe Quotes

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas 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?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes