Adam Gopnik Quotes About Listening

Quotes about: Listening

• 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

  Sex, Writing, Self

• 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

  Writing, Winning, Your Side

  "Facing History" by Adam Gopnik, www.newyorker.com. April 9, 2012.

• 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

  Past, Listening, Might

  Adam Gopnik (2009). “Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life”, p.142, Vintage

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