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 GOPNIKThe relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
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Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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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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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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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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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The 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.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
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Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
ADAM GOPNIK