Renata Adler Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Fear ... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday. — Renata Adler

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

Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway. — Renata Adler

She was by no means one of the great refusers. Not an existentialist hero, or a Rosa Parks, or even a Bartleby. — Renata Adler

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation. — Renata Adler

... a kind of Calvinist in reverse; that is, he was uncompromisingly bohemian — Renata Adler

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems. — Renata Adler

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

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience. — Renata Adler

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

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

Aldo said he was bored to tearsies by my grandmother's diminutives. — Renata Adler

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

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether. — Renata Adler

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. — Renata Adler

altogether too much of life is mood. Aldo — Renata Adler

Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is a good soul and someone a villain. And there are just these episodes, anecdotes, places, pauses, hailings of cabs, overcomings of obstacles, or instances of being overcome by them, illnesses, accidents, recoveries, wars, desires, welcomings, rebuffs, baskings (rare, not so long), pinings (more frequent, perhaps, and longer), actions, failures to act, hesitations, proliferations, endings of the line, until there is death. Well, no. I have a wonderful, fond memory, about love and trust and books. — Renata Adler

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with. — Renata Adler

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

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

Escape procedures, however, were in full force. Some people, in a frenzy of antipathy and boredom, were drinking themselves into extreme approximations of longing to be together. Exchanging phone numbers, demanding to have lunch, proposing to share an apartment - the escalations of fellowship had the air of a terminal auction, a fierce adult version of slapjack, a bill-payer loan from a finance company, an attempt to buy with one grand convivial debt, to be paid in future, an exit from each other's company at that instant. — Renata Adler

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

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

He writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. — Renata Adler

And then there were the wallflowers who had recognized for years that the thing was hopeless, who had found in that information a kind of calm. They no longer tried, with a bright and desperate effort, to sustain a conversation with somebody's brother, somebody's usher, somebody's roommate, somebody's roommate's usher's brother ... The category of wallflower who had given up on all this was very quiet, not indifferent, only quiet. And she always brought a book. — Renata Adler

... the particular consequence of his moral vanity was that when he did people an injury, he never forgave them. Never again. — Renata Adler

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

Every love story,every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing. Blackmail, kidnapping, then, are among the extreme violations of the deal. Anyway, I seem to be about to have Jim's child; at least, I think I will, and the thing is I haven't mentioned it to Jim. — Renata Adler

My father always said that it is a reasonable expectation of life that no one will go out of his way, against his own interest, to break his word or to hurt another person. And this turns out, not just in obvious cases, for example haters, pathological people and institutions, sadists, but in everyday life itself to be plain untrue. I wonder why. A reasonable expectation of life, I have found, is hardly ever quite borne out. — Renata Adler

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes. — Renata Adler

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

It is all weird. I am not always well. — Renata Adler

Our ambitions were, nonetheless, what those of any sensible group of women at that time, perhaps at any modern time, ought to have been: to become safe and successful; to marry someone safe and successful; to have for our children some sort of worldly safety and success. From time to time, however, there is something, I don't know, wistful, about how it has turned out. Not just Brecht's great ship of eight sales and the fifty cannon. The other ships. Perhaps the tall ships, the fleet, the craft, the other ships that don't come in. — Renata Adler

The girls were always running out of money, out of cash, precisely, to pay taxi drivers, train conductors, men who delivered pizzas after dark. They borrowed cash, normally, upon arrival. They borrowed passions - Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, Mozart, hiking, the Bible - from each other, as girls of another generation borrowed clothes. — Renata Adler

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

I've had our paper's gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press. — Renata Adler

The dishes that were meant to be hot were never quite as warm as those that were meant to be chilled. — Renata Adler

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

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

The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time. — Renata Adler

A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine's limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way, until it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever, and never yet quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene
a bullet, a heart attack, a cry from shore that dinner's ready, or company has come, or junior's run away
the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent. — Renata Adler

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

But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life — Renata Adler

Self-pity is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative. — Renata Adler

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history. — Renata Adler

You can rely too much, my love, on the unspoken things. And the wry smile. I have that smile myself, and I've learned the silence too, over the years. Along with your expressions, like No notion and Of necessity. What happens, though, when it is all unsaid, is that you wake up one morning, no, it's more like late one afternoon, and it's not just unsaid, it's gone. That's all. Just gone. I remember this word, that look, that small inflection, after all this. I used to hold them, trust them, read them like a rune. Like a sign that there was a house, a billet, a civilization where we were. I look back and I think I was just there all alone. Collecting wisps and signs. — Renata Adler

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

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

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act
no campaign or tract, statement or rampage
has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and a frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the 1960's. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what? — Renata Adler

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. — Renata Adler

The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives. — Renata Adler

So it is to be another Christmas, then, and another New Year's on my own. Well, it is all right. I have grown used to it, have come almost to prefer it. Those days for most adults, it is generally acknowledged, and perhaps for all but the fewest children are so grim. Along with birthdays and of course Thanksgiving, only worse. Why observe them, then, unless one is for the sake of the children, or the office, or someone else's sake, obliged to. Well, no reason. — Renata Adler

I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number. — Renata Adler

People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more. — Renata Adler

The score," the megaphone on the ferry around Manhattan said, from time to time, without further explanation, "is one to nothing." to the foreigners, unaware perhaps that a World Series was in progress, this may have seemed an obscure instruction, or a commentary on the sights. "In the top of the fifth," it said, with some excitement, as we rounded Wall Street, "the score is five to one. — Renata Adler

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

Those for whom there was, first dimly, then more bright, then dimly again, a possibility. Which, though dimly, perhaps still exists, but which they know, have somehow always known, would never come to anything. They were never, how can I put this, going to be a part of life. It is as though, going through a landscape, through the seasons, in the same general direction as everybody else, they never quite made it to the road. Through the years, humanity, like a tide of refugees or pilgrims, shoeless and in rags, or in Mercedes, station wagons, running shoes, were traveling on, joined by others, falling by the way. And we, joined though we may be, briefly, by other strays, or by road travelers on their little detours, nonetheless never quite joined the continuing procession, of life and birth, never quite found or made it to the road. Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine. — Renata Adler

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers. — Renata Adler

Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances in the movies in a while. (Nobody even seems to neck in theaters any more.) ... when the mechanics and sadism quotients go up, the movie love interest goes dead, and the film just lies there, giving a certain amount of offense. — Renata Adler

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

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

I took a little celebrational nap. — Renata Adler

... 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

Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time. — Renata Adler

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of the case for a long, long time. — Renata Adler

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

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know. — Renata Adler

Late-sleeping Utopians, especially, persist like mercury. I am a fanatic myself, although not a woman of temperament. I get nervous at scenes. I stole a washcloth once from a motel in Angkor Wat. The bellboy was incensed. I had to give it back. To promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity - I believe all that. I go to parties almost whenever I am asked. I think a high tone of moral indignation, used too often, is an ugly thing. I get up at eight. Quite often now I have a drink before eleven. In some ways, I have overshot my mark in life in spades. — Renata Adler

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away? — Renata Adler

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions. — Renata Adler

Do you realize how angry you sound? must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language. — Renata Adler