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.
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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 think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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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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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
ADAM GOPNIK