Adam Gopnik Quotes

If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:

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.

That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up

It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.