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 GOPNIKLose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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.
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I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
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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 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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Wit and puns aren’t just décor in the mind; they’re essential signs that the mind knows it’s on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.
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Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.
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That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
ADAM GOPNIK