Top 40 Renata Adler Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Renata Adler

2. “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

3. “Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.”

— Renata Adler

4. “I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.”

— Renata Adler

5. “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

6. “I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time.”

— Renata Adler

7. “But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.”

— Renata Adler

8. “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

9. “There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.”

— Renata Adler

10. “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

11. “Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?”

— Renata Adler

12. “It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.”

— Renata Adler

13. “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

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

— Renata Adler

15. “My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.”

— Renata Adler

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

— Renata Adler

17. “Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.”

— Renata Adler

18. “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

19. “There are so many different types of writers. It’s just sheer coincidence that they’re all called writers.”

— Renata Adler

20. “People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.”

— Renata Adler

21. “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

22. “No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.”

— Renata Adler

23. “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

24. “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

25. “The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage–as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. 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.”

— Renata Adler

26. “I took a little celebrational nap.”

— Renata Adler

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Renata Adler

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.”

— Renata Adler

36. “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

37. “The dishes that were meant to be hot were never quite as warm as those that were meant to be chilled.”

— Renata Adler

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

— Renata Adler

39. “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

40. “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

41. “The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.”

— Renata Adler

42. “None of us is leading quite the life we were at all prepared for.”

— Renata Adler

43. “Greg, who had spent the winter in a Patmos monastery, had a single Greek word: Oreia. It seemed to be an exclamation of approval or joy. He used it incessantly, in a tone so flat, bleak and despairing that we all began to like it. Oreia, we would say, when the waiter, after four hours, brought our dinner. Oreia, when, after nine straight days, the rain stopped. Oreia, when the radio, which was dead most nights, woke up and spoke the news.”

— Renata Adler

44. “It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that one of their Kevins was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.”

— Renata Adler