Quotes from Renata Adler

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

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.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

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.

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.

a kind of Calvinist in reverse; that is, he was uncompromisingly bohemian

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The score," the megaphone on the ferry around Manhattan said, from time to time, without further explanation, "is one to nothing." to the foreigners, unaware perhaps that a World Series was in progress, this may have seemed an obscure instruction, or a commentary on the sights. "In the top of the fifth," it said, with some excitement, as we rounded Wall Street, "the score is five to one.

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time.

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.

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

Fear... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

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

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.

The patrolman and the teacher did find Kevin. They brought him to his mother, who had behaved admirably from the first. 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.

The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way on a one way street.

effect, but in the top of the ninth, with the score still 1–0 and the tension at Shea

Only last week, the Bureau announced that one of those fugitive girls might be "feigning pregnancy." It struck me as a strange idea of what constitutes disguise. Whiskers, I would have thought, yes. Sunglasses even, a wig; but pregnancy, no. Jim says I misunderstood what the Bureau meant. The "feigned pregnancy" was considered, not as a disguise, but as a means of getting people not to shoot. I don't know.