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…
ADAM GOPNIKLove, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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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.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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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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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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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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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
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK