Top 52 Renata Adler Quotes
#1. Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
Renata Adler
#2. Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.
Renata Adler
#3. Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.
Renata Adler
#4. Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.
Renata Adler
#6. The dishes that were meant to be hot were never quite as warm as those that were meant to be chilled.
Renata Adler
#7. My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind - like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
Renata Adler
#8. In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.
Renata Adler
#9. There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.
Renata Adler
#11. She was by no means one of the great refusers. Not an existentialist hero, or a Rosa Parks, or even a Bartleby.
Renata Adler
#12. The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.
Renata Adler
#13. Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.
Renata Adler
#14. I wonder if you know at all what is happening in my heart, what a word. I suppose you don't. You've so many females, wife, sister, daughters, cousins, dog, in your life that you've probably confused me with them all.
Renata Adler
#15. If you once cede to the Court the power to decide elections, let alone even the power to halt counting of the votes, then you have ceded it everything.
Renata Adler
#16. But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life
Renata Adler
#17. Self-pity is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.
Renata Adler
#18. No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
Renata Adler
#19. Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.
Renata Adler
#20. My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.
Renata Adler
#21. They were saying "Make peace, not war," and so, the Commander of the Ohio State National Guard testified in the course of the Kent State trials, he threw a rock at them.
Renata Adler
#22. Do you realize how angry you sound? must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.
Renata Adler
#23. The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
Renata Adler
#24. The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.
Renata Adler
#25. Fear ... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.
Renata Adler
#26. Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener ... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.
Renata Adler
#27. I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."
Renata Adler
#28. Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.
Renata Adler
#29. That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
Renata Adler
#31. I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.
Renata Adler
#32. People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.
Renata Adler
#33. ... a kind of Calvinist in reverse; that is, he was uncompromisingly bohemian
Renata Adler
#34. Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.
Renata Adler
#35. The time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.
Renata Adler
#36. People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.
Renata Adler
#37. ... the particular consequence of his moral vanity was that when he did people an injury, he never forgave them. Never again.
Renata Adler
#38. The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time.
Renata Adler
#39. ... They used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense.
Renata Adler
#40. Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.
Renata Adler
#41. There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.
Renata Adler
#42. A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.
Renata Adler
#43. The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
Renata Adler
#44. Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.
Renata Adler
#45. It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
#46. Maybe there are stories, even, like solitaire or canasta; they are shuffled and dealt, then they do or they do not come out. Or the deck falls on the floor. Or a piece of country music, a quartet, a parade, the flag - all the things one ought by now to be too old for - touch, whatever it is.
Renata Adler
#47. The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.
Renata Adler
#48. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.
Renata Adler
#49. The roof of the front porch of the house is covered, for some reason, with moss, and also, on one side, with wisteria, which gives the house a sort of raffish Veronica Lake look, a disheveled charm.
Renata Adler
#50. Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
Renata Adler
#51. My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Renata Adler
#52. Aldo said he was bored to tearsies by my grandmother's diminutives.
Renata Adler
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