The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIKThe first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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 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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The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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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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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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 future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
ADAM GOPNIK