Adam Gopnik Quotes, Past Quotes, Listening Quotes

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Past Quotes , Listening 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

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

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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Two Quotes

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Men Quotes

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Art Quotes , Skeletons 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Autumn Quotes , Light 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Mind Quotes , Essentials Quotes

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas 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 French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Distance Quotes , Believe 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

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

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

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Book Quotes , Kids Quotes

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

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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

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

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Water Quotes , Dinner 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.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Joy Quotes

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

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Tags : Adam Gopnik Quotes , Writing Quotes , Heart Quotes