Renata Adler Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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
The forward-directed attitudes, I think, are these: curiosity, ambition, love, courage, hunger, duty, rage. They may be backward-formed, but they are forward directed, moving toward the future. Fear, too, of course, is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

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
I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

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.

Renata Adler
One of the frightening things about our time is the number of people who think it is a form of intellectual audacity to be stupid. A whole generation seems to be taking on an easy distrust of thought.

Renata Adler
Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer's breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. Page 118

Renata Adler
This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. Page 116

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
There are editors, it is apparently an occupational hazard, who cannot leave a piece, or a line of a piece, intact—eating through a text, leaf and branch, like tent caterpillars, leaving everywhere their mark.

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

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
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
I asked how long it [his book] was. 'Eight hundred and ninety-seven pages,' he said. Then he added, earnestly, 'You don't suppose they'll think I wrote it in a fit of pique.'

Renata Adler
But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love. Page 17

Renata Adler
There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political

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
There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

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

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
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
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
Sanity... is the most profound moral option of our time.

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

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

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

Renata Adler