Renata Adler - Speedboat (1976)

18 Sourced Quotes

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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.

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

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

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

Renata Adler