[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, premptive paranoia.
About This Quote
About Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik was a contemporary American writer. Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist, who was raised in Montreal, Canada. He is best known as a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which he has contributed nonfiction, fiction, memoir, and criticism since 1986. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Fear — Understanding and overcoming the anxieties that hold us back