Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIKI still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
ADAM GOPNIK -
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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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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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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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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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
ADAM GOPNIK






