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.
ADAM GOPNIKThe scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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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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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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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.
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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.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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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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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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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.
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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.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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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.
ADAM GOPNIK