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 GOPNIKMen choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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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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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Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I
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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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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
ADAM GOPNIK






