New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIKIf 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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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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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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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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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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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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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
ADAM GOPNIK






