Renata Adler's 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.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

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

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

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

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

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.