Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
ADAM GOPNIKThat any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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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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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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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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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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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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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIK






