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.
ADAM GOPNIKThe reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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.
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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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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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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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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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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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If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
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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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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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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.”
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK