If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
ADAM GOPNIKDaniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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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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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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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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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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We don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
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Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.
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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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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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For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I
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There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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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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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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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.
ADAM GOPNIK