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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Adam Gopnik

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
ADAM GOPNIK

Keenest Mean Meeting Restaurant Someplace Thinking Wine
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
ADAM GOPNIK

Convention Drawing Finding Los Schematic Shade Shape Surprising Symbol Welter
I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
ADAM GOPNIK

Civilised Core Life Live Mean Think Thinking
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?
ADAM GOPNIK

Ask Campus Country Liberal Little Man One People Question Truth
Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
ADAM GOPNIK

Buzz Buzzing Feeling Give Giving Head Idea Merely Start Try
Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
ADAM GOPNIK

Enter Found Individual Like Mind Reason Right Small Something Sound
I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
ADAM GOPNIK

Concede Devotion Fanaticism Journalism People Thinking Understand Well
There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
ADAM GOPNIK

Explore First Goes Journey Kind People Reel Thinking Traveler Two
I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
ADAM GOPNIK

Confection Make More Think Sense Sentence Slightly Write Written
I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
ADAM GOPNIK

Cooking Domestic Guilty Here Most Painless Party Take Truth Undue Virtue
Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
ADAM GOPNIK

Come Fanaticism Flavor Human Being Many
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
ADAM GOPNIK

Afterward Better Defined Enacted Know Leave Light Love Paper Trace
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
ADAM GOPNIK

Chose Circuitous Good Looking Mind More Path Route Showing Something Suggest Worthwhile
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Eye Half Light Longing Looking Lost Minute Rise Shine Soul
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

Attacked Believe Possible Problem Right Side Something Trust
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
ADAM GOPNIK

Country Eerie Legend Library Long People Purpose Serious Shelved Space Time
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK

Brutality Country Life Moral Scale Scandal
I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
ADAM GOPNIK

Always Drawn Idea Particularly People Sophisticated Think Thinking
Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bad Good MIssed Missing Name Out Sometimes Think Wanting Well
We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
ADAM GOPNIK

Emotion Eye Feel Lost Minute Name Somehow Thinking
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Accomplishment Art Become Faith Intensity More Practice Sustained
It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
ADAM GOPNIK

Mercilessly Missionaries Mock Mormonism Pretension Truth Virtue
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

After All Better Cling Diminish Down Elegantly Faith Glamour Man People Question Today Tomorrow Upside
The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
ADAM GOPNIK

Desire Happen Hot Overwhelming Something Truly Underlying
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bending Drawing Instinct Instruction Player Risk Thing Those Uneasy
For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I
ADAM GOPNIK

Art Idea Mistrust Poetry Spend Talk Talking Truth Writing Year
Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
ADAM GOPNIK

Anyone Certainty Easily Fluency Practice Pressure Think Thinking Writing

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

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