“Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.”

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

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Adam Gopnik26

American journalist 1956

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“Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me.”

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Context: Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.

“Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

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“This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer.”

Jack Thompson (attorney) (1951) American activist and disbarred attorney

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“And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind,
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in.
And I would have liked to have known you,
But I was just a kid.
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did.”

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“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

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“Lucidity of mind, like the rays of the sun, can have no effect except by the continuity of a direct line; it can divine only on condition of not breaking that line; the curvettings of chance bemuddle it.”

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La lucidité, de même que les rayons du soleil, n’a d’effet que par la fixité de la ligne droite, elle ne devine qu’à la condition de ne pas rompre son regard; elle se trouble dans les sautillements de la chance.
Source: A Bachelor's Establishment (1842), Ch. IV.

“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”

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“Any time a whole bunch of kids like something, they find a reason to ban it. If kids suddenly started stuffing napkins into their pockets and really liked doing that, they'd find a reason to forbid it.”

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“Like a heartbeat. Something inside me. Some dream. I think it's being a dreamer as a child. Dreamy kids become actors, don't they?”

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Quoted in Dominic Wills, "Michael Gambon Biography" http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/biographies/michael_gambon_biog.html, tiscali.co.uk (undated)

“Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.”

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Adam Gopnik26

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