Adam Gopnik Quotes, Loyalty Quotes, Past Quotes

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Loyalty Quotes , Past 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

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Reading Quotes , Pirate 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

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

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Long Quotes , World Quotes

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Light Quotes , Paper 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Wall Quotes , Block 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Mean Quotes

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Heart Quotes , Hands Quotes

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Cooking Quotes , Sides 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