Adam Gopnik
"The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games."
16 Quotes
"The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games."
"تُقام بطولة العالم في مخيلتي، التي لا ريب أنها شديدة الحنين، تحت ضوء عصر خريفيّ ما، ومشاهدتها حصراً في صقيع منتصف الليل القارس يكسر سحر أفضل المباريات."
Adam Gopnik
"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."
"الذهاب إلى المطعم من أشدّ مباهجي. فلقاء الأصدقاء، قديمهم وجديدهم، في مكانٍ ما، وطلب النبيذ، وتناول الطعام، محاطاً بالغُرباء، هو في ظنّي جوهر ما يعنيه عيش الحياة المتحضّرة."
Adam Gopnik
"All the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it."
"لقد استُخدمت جميع وسائط الوعي الحديث – من المطبعة إلى الراديو والأفلام – بالسهولة ذاتها من قِبَل الرجعيين السلطويين، ثم من قِبَل الشموليين المعاصرين، لتقليص الحرية وفرض الامتثال، تمامًا كما استخدمها التحرريون لتوسيعها."
Adam Gopnik
"[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan."
"كما يكشف التاريخ العسكري، غالبًا ما تكون الخطة السيئة أفضل من عدم وجود خطة على الإطلاق، خاصة إذا اعتقد من هم في الجانب الآخر أنها خطة جيدة."
Adam Gopnik
"The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination."
"الضوء الذي نحصل عليه بإحراق فزاعات القش ليس هو ما نقصده بالاستنارة."
Adam Gopnik
"It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks."
Adam Gopnik
"What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity."
Adam Gopnik
"Wit and puns aren't just decor 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
"Big writers become a kind of shared climate."
Adam Gopnik
"Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life."
Adam Gopnik
"Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality."
Adam Gopnik
"[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--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. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia."
Adam Gopnik
"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
"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
"Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing."
Adam Gopnik
"This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied."
Adam Gopnik
✉️
Get more quotes like Adam Gopnik's — every morning.
Join thousands of wisdom seekers getting daily quotes from 300,000+ curated sources.
Free forever. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
🎉 Check your inbox to confirm your subscription!