Quotes by Adam Gopnik

“Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all.”

“Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the f...”

“We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later—it might; it does!—but because it’s obnoxious now.”

“Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, on...”

“Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once.”

“The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a littl...”

“Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard.”

“As satirists have pointed out for millennia, civilized behavior is artificial and ridiculous: it means pretending to be glad to see people you aren’t glad to see, praising parties you wished you ha...”

“A document, recently released—LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report of the 1 October Mass Casualty Shooting, to give it its official name—offering the local-police-department summary of the Las Vegas...”

“In any case, the idea that somehow liberals are responsible for bringing on right-wing authoritarianism is of a piece with the domestic abuser's refrain Look what you made me do. Or, for that matte...”