After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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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Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?
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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.
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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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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
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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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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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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.
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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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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Making an idea into an emotion.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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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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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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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
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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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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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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK