Renata Adler quotes

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. (Renata Adler)
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.
Renata Adler
Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.
Renata Adler
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
Renata Adler
Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.
Renata Adler
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.
Renata Adler
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 who write at all.
Renata Adler
Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.
Renata Adler
Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer's breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. Page 118.
Renata Adler
It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
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 unwell. (Renata Adler)
But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.
Renata Adler
This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel.
Renata Adler