The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
ADAM GOPNIKThe 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.
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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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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The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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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.
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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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Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
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For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.
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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
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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.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in “The Book Of Mormon,” right?
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
ADAM GOPNIK