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
ADAM GOPNIKThere 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
ADAM GOPNIK -
What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIK -
The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
ADAM GOPNIK -
Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The 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
ADAM GOPNIK -
We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 -
I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
ADAM GOPNIK -
That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIK