Quote

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

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Good
Less
Relief
Dissect
Things
Sense
Professional
Memorize
Never
Place
Table
Frog
Life
Firsts
Tables
Frogs
First
Absence
Competence
Feel
Adults
Impossibility
Feels
Longer
Accomplishment
Really
Whatever
Adult
Periodic

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
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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.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of I's, and a listening audience somehow turns each I into a me. This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literatur
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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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.
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. 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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