"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."
Quote collection
Renata Adler quotes (page 2 of 3)
46 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time."
"Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective."
"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."
"the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts."
"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."
"Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature."
"A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit."
"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."
"There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers."
"Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?"
"The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives."
"There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation."
"The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems."
"I took a little celebrational nap."