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.
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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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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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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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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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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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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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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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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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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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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
ADAM GOPNIK