Renata Adler Quotes

33 quotes in 512 categories

• 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…
• Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and…
• The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and…
• Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.
• 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 whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
• 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…
• I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.
• The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.
• My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
• The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
• I took a little celebrational nap.
• 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…
• My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
• Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
• In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

Browse Renata Adler Quotes by Category