(10 quotes found)
“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
“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. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.”
“Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.”
“Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.”
“No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.”
“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 kind.”
“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.”
“At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. "There's one," it said. That was in the l960s. Ever since, he's wondered. There's one what?”
“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.”
“It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history”
