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.
ADAM GOPNIKWriting doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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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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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 first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
ADAM GOPNIK