Diana Trilling Quotes

19 quotes in 350 categories

• There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.
• We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.
• Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.
• Whoever had known sexual jealousy, that most destructive of emotions-and this would be so for men no less than women-had known madness and had now…
• At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process…
• The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between…
• Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.
• Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm…
• Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.
• Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether…
• In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others…
• Wit isn't a useful instrument of defense; it may make a short-run appeal, but it creates a backlash- one saw this in the Hiss case…
• Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.
• Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.
• My career as a critic still lay in the future but unconsciously I may have been preparing for it. They were not easy companions, these…
• Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.
• I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.
• I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.
• Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.

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