Quote of the Day

[Fred Astaire] is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams…He is “poetry in motion.” His movements are so removed from ours that he sets a limit on our own ambitions. Nobody hopes or expects to dances like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.

—Zadie Smith, “Dance Lessons for Writers”