Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIKOver 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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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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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.”
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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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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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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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.
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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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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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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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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
ADAM GOPNIK