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 GOPNIKIn the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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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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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”
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I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
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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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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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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.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
ADAM GOPNIK