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 GOPNIKOver 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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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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
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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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.
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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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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.
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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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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
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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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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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