If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
ADAM GOPNIKOf having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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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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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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That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
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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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I am a guilty party here – to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
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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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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.
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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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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.
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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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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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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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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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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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