Gopnik Quotes & Sayings

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations. — Alison Gopnik

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy. — Adam Gopnik

Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources, you find that the women are just as likely to be successful. — Alison Gopnik

We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

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

How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God. — Adam Gopnik

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

Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

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

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

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 literature. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

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

A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful - they are goddesses - and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser's name? Paris. C'est normal. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. — Adam Gopnik

Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what'sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-month-old baby will go into a triumphant frenzy of pointing and naming: "What'sat! Dog! What'sat! Clock! What'sat juice, spoon, orange, high chair, clock! Clock! Clock!" Often this is the point at which even fondly attentive parents lose track of how many new words the baby has learned. It's as if the baby discovers that everything has a name, and this discovery triggers a kind of naming explosion. — Alison Gopnik

The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one. — Alison Gopnik

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind. — Adam Gopnik

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

Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be. — Alison Gopnik

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

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private. — Adam Gopnik

There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish Room. They were both named Inez. And on that day Big Inez gave Little Inez a plantation all her own. Two thousand acres. Then her little sister came running in and said, "Grandmother, can I have a plantation too?" And Big Inez looked down and said, "Child, your name is Alice. You were named for your Yankee grandmother. Go ask your Yankee grandmother for a plantation. — Adam Gopnik

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. — 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. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

An assault on an ideology is not merely different from a threat made to a person; it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people. — Adam Gopnik

parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass. — 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. — Adam Gopnik

The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small - to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways - to get it. — Adam Gopnik

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

We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention. — Alison Gopnik

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

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings. — Adam Gopnik

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer. — Alison Gopnik

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know - apart from the more obvious sensual ones - is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols. Making an idea into an emotion. — Adam Gopnik

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners — Adam Gopnik

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

Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend. — Alison Gopnik

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

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

Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history — Adam Gopnik

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

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down. — Adam Gopnik

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn. — Alison Gopnik

As we waited, I insisted that the reason government bureaus could seem so bureaucratic was that, by their nature, they have to be inclusive, and they can't inflict the basic market rationale of price differences upon their customers. If the privileged could pay more for quicker service, they would, but this would undermine the premises of citizenship. That first-class passengers get a shorter line through security claws at our idea of citizenship, which ought to include the notion that the rich and the poor suffer the indignities and delays of common civic cause equally. — Adam Gopnik

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

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. — Alison Gopnik

There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal - like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al - Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. "But what shall I say to Hal - that I have never loved him?" Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, "Et Al - qu'est-ce que je vais lui dire? — Adam Gopnik

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical. — Alison Gopnik

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways. — Alison Gopnik

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense. — Adam Gopnik

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos. — Alison Gopnik

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity. — Adam Gopnik

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

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about. — Alison Gopnik

The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up. — 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

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire. — Adam Gopnik

When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man. — Adam Gopnik

I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the "now," year after year. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly. — Alison Gopnik

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

What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not really an intellectual.' — Alison Gopnik

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries. — Adam Gopnik

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. — Adam Gopnik

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

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood. — Alison Gopnik

Gopnik compares baby consciousness to that of an adult dumped into the middle of a foreign city, totally overwhelmed, constantly turning to see new things, struggling to make sense of it all. Things are even worse for a baby, actually, because even the most stressed-out adult can choose to think of something else: we can look forward to getting back to the hotel; imagine how we would describe our trip to friends; fantasize, daydream, or pray. The baby just is, trapped in the here and now. — Paul Bloom

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

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city. — Alison 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

What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

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

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

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

It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed. — Adam Gopnik

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity. — Adam Gopnik

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

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

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

As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In — David Bayles

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

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