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.
ADAM GOPNIKThe light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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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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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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .
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Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?
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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 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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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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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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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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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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It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
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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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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
ADAM GOPNIK