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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.

Adam Gopnik

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Adam Gopnik
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: August 24
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Good
Path
Impressive
Things
Looking
Handsome
Men
Beautiful
Impress
Circuitous
Women
Chose
Impresses
Take
Worthwhile
Route
Work
Showing
Suggests
Mind
Intellect
Routes
Something
Chosen
Paths

More quotes by Adam Gopnik

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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
Adam Gopnik
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For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
Adam Gopnik
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
Adam Gopnik
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I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
Adam Gopnik
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
Adam Gopnik
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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. 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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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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.
Adam Gopnik
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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
Adam Gopnik
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Frauds master our minds magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
Adam Gopnik
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution - perhaps the first modern political institution.
Adam Gopnik
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You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
Adam Gopnik
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What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
Adam Gopnik
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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
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
Adam Gopnik
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
Adam Gopnik
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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. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
Adam Gopnik
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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