The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIKAmerican long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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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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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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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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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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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






