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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

Adam Gopnik

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
ADAM GOPNIK

Additional Bookstore Field Interest Out Stuff Usually Way
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Artificial Good Invented Little Quality Secret Taste
In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
ADAM GOPNIK

Age Bad Country Eye Faith Good Heart Malice People Reread Thurber Working Writing
It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
ADAM GOPNIK

Answer Country Easy Grander Kill Same Thing Tonight Yourself
Daniel 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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Apply Art Beautiful Brain Exist Mind Most Music Singer Song Sophisticated
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Back Befogged Listening might Often Past Present Still Unknowable
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.
ADAM GOPNIK

Bad Good MIssed Missing Name Out Sometimes Think Wanting Well
Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
ADAM GOPNIK

Draw Knowing Mistrust Poetry Produce Rhythm
Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
ADAM GOPNIK

Assure Better Cause Credibility Defined Good Kill Lot Now One People Willingness World
New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
ADAM GOPNIK

Always Country Experience Memories Place Possible State Worldwide
The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
ADAM GOPNIK

Fear Hysteria Incipient Invitation Note Real Relentless Scenarios Self Ungrounded
Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIK

Accomplishment Adult Competence Less Professional relief Sense Sum
You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
ADAM GOPNIK

Coffee Culture Decent Food Grow Growing Together Up
This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
ADAM GOPNIK

Absorption Alchemy Experience Kind Literature Reader Self Share
The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.
ADAM GOPNIK

Desire Happen Hot Overwhelming Something Truly Underlying
Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.
ADAM GOPNIK

Alcohol Distract Father Finding Helpful Process Something Writing

It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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