Adam Gopnik Quotes

Love is a positive effect. Love can never have a negative effect, only a positive effect.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

For me, romance is only 'true' when there are two sides to it. I think to have true romance you have to have the moments where you feel alone and you're crying and you feel like your heart's about to break... as well as the moments where you're floating through this orgasmic dream state.

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.

Is love a fancy or a feeling.... or a Ferrars?

And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.

Food like love is a deeply emotional matter.

There are a few things that can be done only by experiencing them. Love is one of them. There is no way to learn it; you have to do it. And by trial and error one learns.

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

The ancient Greeks, poets, authors and philosophers all puzzled over the question but nobody really knows what love is - including me. Longing for another person is an exciting mental experience.

I'm totally into the emotional aspect of things.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.

Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy.

The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

Romance is something people make fun of others for caring about, and yet it’s something that’s very natural to care about—it’s a loving connection between people, like family and friendships: it’s a significant emotional choice people make.

Half the joys and half the sorrows of this world are discovered in bed.

Love is a human experience, not a political statement.

Stay neurotic. Stay frustrated. Stay emotional. Stay excited. Your life is happening.

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

You know there is no one in the world I would rather sleep with than Yuki.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

To achieve the intimacy between performer and audience in storytelling, I feel like I have to let the audience in on my emotional state, not just, "Here's a story I'm going to tell by rote, and you're just going to listen to it, because I'm such a wonderfully entertaining fellow." It's the idea of sharing enough of myself that it's not just all about, "Look at me, look at me." There's an element to it of, "You understand what I'm talking about, right? You've been in this place that I've been in," which makes it a richer experience.

I have already spent roughly five thousand hours asleep next to you. This has to mean something.