The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIKWriting 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
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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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 think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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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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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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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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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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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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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 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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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
ADAM GOPNIK