Renata Adler Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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