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 GOPNIKAfter all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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?
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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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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.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs
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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.
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
ADAM GOPNIK