Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
ADAM GOPNIKThe future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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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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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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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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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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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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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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
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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.
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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK