The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
ADAM GOPNIKIn bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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.
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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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Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
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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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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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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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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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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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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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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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.”
ADAM GOPNIK