The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
ADAM GOPNIKIn 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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…
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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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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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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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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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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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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
ADAM GOPNIK