Quotes from Renata Adler

After a while, there was one of those awkward, off-romantic moments. "It's not my age, is it?" he said, earnestly. He was seventy-four. "No, no," I said, "I guess I'm just neurotic." That seemed all right.

There was also a little pamphlet, with a half page of instructions for putting the rifle together, six pages of instructions for joining the National Rifle Association. I could have figured out how to join the N.R.A. without those instructions, particularly since the pamphlet included an application for membership.

I think that 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.

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. Some people get a jump on the morning in other ways—

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. 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 that write at all.

But when the birthday song is imminent, the group is small. There is the possibility that everyone will mouthe.

Aldo said he was bored to tearsies by my grandmother's diminutives.

Ma eccola lì, la gente sempre pronta a disapprovare, seduta al ristorante a sgranocchiare ossicini.

I always pack too much whenever I travel," a lady said quite loudly as the windows fogged. "We're moving from New York. My son has been mugged six times. He's just eleven. We can't keep buying him new watches." She went on like that.

We were as competitive as only a child state can be.

There are no tears here," the young construction worker said at the funeral, when the ancient union leader, with two strokes, three heart attacks, and a lung condition, died at last. "True," the priest said, surveying the mourners in the cathedral. "No tears. Either the wake went on too long or he was a hard, hard man.

They were saying "Make peace, not war," and so, the Commander of the Ohio State National Guard testified in the course of the Kent State trials, he threw a rock at them.

We spoke of a friend of ours who had died the night before, at forty-three. "But my God! I'm forty-one," a bearded banker said. "Don't worry," his wife, who is German, answered. "There is no order. It is not a line.

I knew someone who used to go to sleep counting, not sheep, but people against whom he had grievances—bullies from childhood, kindergarten teachers, back to nannies even, bosses, employees, anybody awful up to the preceding day.

He lived on frankness and economy.

The world is everything that is the case. And in the second place because. Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

altogether too much of life is mood. Aldo

Andiamo a casa tua o all'Elaine's?» ha chiesto il ragazzo. Erano le tre del mattino. Aveva divorziato da poco. In quel momento la stessa domanda risuonava nei taxi di tutta New York.

Maybe there are stories, even, like solitaire or canasta; they are shuffled and dealt, then they do or they do not come out. Or the deck falls on the floor. Or a piece of country music, a quartet, a parade, the flag—all the things one ought by now to be too old for—touch, whatever it is.

I've had our paper's gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press.

As always, the passengers, having felt the squalor, the suspense, the scale of confinement, applauded when the wheels touched the ground.

To the contrary" is what the head of the mine workers' union said when he was asked whether he had ordered the murder of a rival and his family. It is hard to know what to the contrary of ordering a murder might, exactly, mean. Jim thinks ordering a birth, perhaps, or else a resurrection.

It is all weird. I am not always well.

She was by no means one of the great refusers. Not an existentialist hero, or a Rosa Parks, or even a Bartleby.