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.
ADAM GOPNIKIf 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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.
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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.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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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?
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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
ADAM GOPNIK






