77 Quotes by Renata Adler

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.

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.

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

«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.

Da quando faccio questo lavoro sono uscita con quattro figli di padri famosi, due uomini d'affari autori di un romanzo incompiuto, tre scrittori con il vezzo di chiedere "posso usarlo?" quando dicevo qualcosa che gli suonava bene, e un editor rivoluzionario che mi accarezzava i capelli e diceva "sei dolcissima" ogni volta che gli facevo una domanda.

The girls were always running out of money, out of cash, precisely, to pay taxi drivers, train conductors, men who delivered pizzas after dark. They borrowed cash, normally, upon arrival. They borrowed passions—Wallace Stevens, Joseph Conrad, Mozart, hiking, the Bible—from each other, as girls of another generation borrowed clothes.

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.

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.

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.