I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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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.
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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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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.
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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.
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Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
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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.
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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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.
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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.
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