Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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
-
-
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
ADAM GOPNIK -
Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
ADAM GOPNIK -
Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
American 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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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 GOPNIK -
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
ADAM GOPNIK -
That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
ADAM GOPNIK -
You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
ADAM GOPNIK