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 GOPNIKLove, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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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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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The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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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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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
ADAM GOPNIK