Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
ADAM GOPNIKWhatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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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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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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I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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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.
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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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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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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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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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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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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
ADAM GOPNIK