Quote

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

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Renata Adler
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: October 19
Author
Film Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Milano
Italia
Brett Daniels
People
Accidents
Preoccupations
Bored
Preoccupation
Blessing
Idleness
Unless
Idle
Sleep
Accident
Often
Cruel
Great
Boredom
Time
Cruelty

More quotes by Renata Adler

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My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
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No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
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Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.
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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 global distress.
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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.
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Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.
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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 and I still lead some of them.
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I took a little celebrational nap.
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There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
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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.
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There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.
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The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
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The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
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My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
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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 and I still lead some of them.
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the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.
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The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
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I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.
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Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
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Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
Renata Adler