That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIKMerely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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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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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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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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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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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
ADAM GOPNIK






