Top 100 Gopnik Quotes
#1. As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In
David Bayles
#2. So what was the hardest part?' Mr Gopnik said.
'I'm sorry?'
'Of working for William Traynor. It sounds like quite a challenge.'
I hesitated. The room was suddenly very quiet. 'Letting him go.' I said. And found myself unexpectedly biting back tears.
Jojo Moyes
#3. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Adam Gopnik
#4. It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
Alison Gopnik
#5. 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
#6. History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners.
Adam Gopnik
#7. 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
#8. Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.
Adam Gopnik
#9. Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going.
Alison Gopnik
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.
Adam Gopnik
#13. There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
Adam Gopnik
#14. Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
Adam Gopnik
#15. Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
Adam Gopnik
#16. A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world.
Alison Gopnik
#17. I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.
Alison Gopnik
#18. 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
#19. Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
Adam Gopnik
#20. Can't repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, "the day of our life," Randall Jarrell called it.
Adam Gopnik
#21. parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.
Adam Gopnik
#22. Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
Alison Gopnik
#23. Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
Alison Gopnik
#24. I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.
Alison Gopnik
#25. How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.
Adam Gopnik
#26. Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.
Alison Gopnik
#27. 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
#28. If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.
Alison Gopnik
#29. We know what makes babies smart and happy and thrive. It's having human beings who are dedicated to caring for them - human beings who are well supported, not stressed out and not poor.
Alison Gopnik
#30. Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
Alison Gopnik
#31. Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape,
Alison Gopnik
#32. Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
Adam Gopnik
#33. The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
Alison Gopnik
#34. 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.
Adam Gopnik
#35. Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to understand it - is a fully shared and objective one.
Alison Gopnik
#36. We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools.
Alison Gopnik
#37. 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
#38. The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
Adam Gopnik
#39. 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
#40. I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
Adam Gopnik
#41. 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.
Adam Gopnik
#42. Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'
Alison Gopnik
#43. 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
#44. The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.
Alison Gopnik
#45. I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
Adam Gopnik
#46. Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Alison Gopnik
#47. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.
Alison Gopnik
#48. Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.
Adam Gopnik
#49. From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
Alison Gopnik
#50. One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.
Alison Gopnik
#51. She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn saying, 'Take the pic-ture,' in Funny Face.
Adam Gopnik
#52. The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.
Alison Gopnik
#53. Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.
Alison Gopnik
#54. The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
Alison Gopnik
#55. What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, practice.
Alison Gopnik
#56. The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.
Adam Gopnik
#57. 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
#58. Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history
Adam Gopnik
#59. Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.
Alison Gopnik
#60. Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.
Alison Gopnik
#61. Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.
Alison Gopnik
#62. [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.
Adam Gopnik
#63. We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they're bad at not paying attention - they easily get distracted by anything interesting.
Alison Gopnik
#64. It's not that children are little scientists - it's that scientists are big children. Scientists actually are the few people who as adults get to have this protected time when they can just explore, play, figure out what the world is like.
Alison Gopnik
#65. The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
Alison Gopnik
#66. I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
Adam Gopnik
#67. 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
#68. One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays.
Alison Gopnik
#69. 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
#70. What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
Adam Gopnik
#71. What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
Alison Gopnik
#72. Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
Adam Gopnik
#73. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.
Alison Gopnik
#74. What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
Alison Gopnik
#75. Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.
Alison Gopnik
#76. We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.
Alison Gopnik
#77. That people don't speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.
Adam Gopnik
#78. One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
Alison Gopnik
#79. 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.
Adam Gopnik
#80. In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
Adam Gopnik
#81. We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.
Alison Gopnik
#82. Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.
Alison Gopnik
#83. I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
Alison Gopnik
#84. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
Adam Gopnik
#85. Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
Adam Gopnik
#86. I think universities are trying to figure out how we could use what we know about learning to change our education system, but it is sort of funny that they don't necessarily seem to be consulting the people who are sitting right there on campus.
Alison Gopnik
#87. We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.
Alison Gopnik
#88. As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.
Alison Gopnik
#89. Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
Alison Gopnik
#90. American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World
Adam Gopnik
#91. You have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it.
Adam Gopnik
#92. Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them.
Alison Gopnik
#93. On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
Alison Gopnik
#94. Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
Adam Gopnik
#95. 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.I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
Adam Gopnik
#96. For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.
Alison Gopnik
#97. If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.
Alison Gopnik
#99. 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
#100. Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.
Adam Gopnik
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