Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIKNothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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
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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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Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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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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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.
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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
ADAM GOPNIK