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.
ADAM GOPNIKA 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
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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
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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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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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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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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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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.
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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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.
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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.
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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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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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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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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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.
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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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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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I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
ADAM GOPNIK