Adam Gopnik Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Brutality, Scandal, Moral

  "The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. January 30, 2012.

  46 Copy quote

• We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

  Adam Gopnik

  Travel, Swim, Firsts

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Powerful, Mean, Giving

  "Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. September 12, 2011.

  10 Copy quote

• Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

  Adam Gopnik

  Crazy, Men, Thinking

  13 Copy quote

• The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

  Adam Gopnik

  Loneliness, Feelings, Being Free

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

  10 Copy quote

• Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

  Adam Gopnik

  Wine, Mean, Thinking

  56 Copy quote

• Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

  Adam Gopnik

  Mind, Essentials, Bugs

  "Get Smart" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 4, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

• We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and out of that wanting - well, everything else rises, good and bad. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Eye, Thinking, Names

  4 Copy quote

• Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

  Adam Gopnik

  Magic, Mind, Mazes

  "The real work" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. March 17, 2008.

  11 Copy quote

• What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

  Adam Gopnik

  Innovation, Scarcity, Ease

  "The Fifth Blade" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

• ... 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 - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

  Adam Gopnik

  Photography, Sleep, Emotional

  4 Copy quote

• The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

  Adam Gopnik

  Distance, Believe, Simple

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

  9 Copy quote

• I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

  Adam Gopnik

  Writing, Thinking, Speak

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  5 Copy quote

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

  Adam Gopnik

  Light, Paper, Knows

  "Man of Fetters" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. December 8, 2008.

  6 Copy quote

• After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

  Adam Gopnik

  Rewards, Spinning, Carousels

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

  125 Copy quote

• 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. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

  Adam Gopnik

  People, World, Causes

  "No more Mr. Tough Guy" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

  Adam Gopnik

  Behaviour, Tables, Who We Are

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  4 Copy quote

• Merely 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. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

  Adam Gopnik

  Ideas, Giving, Feelings

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  4 Copy quote

• Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

  Adam Gopnik

  Choices Made, Mind, Easy

  "Music To Your Ears" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. January 28, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  America, People, Height

  7 Copy quote

• There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

  Adam Gopnik

  Thinking, Two, Firsts

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

  4 Copy quote

• I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

  Adam Gopnik

  Thinking, Ideas, People

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• Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

  Adam Gopnik

  Thinking, Good Times, Sometimes

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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; 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.

  Adam Gopnik

  Beautiful, Men, Mind

  "Facing History" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 9, 2012.

  9 Copy quote

• Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...

  Adam Gopnik

  Book, Kids, Long

  "The Dragon's Egg" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. December 5, 2011.

  5 Copy quote

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