I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
ADAM GOPNIKLove, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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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In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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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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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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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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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.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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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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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
ADAM GOPNIK