Diana Trilling famous quotes

04-17-2025

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.
-- Diana Trilling

#Fate #Challenges #Said
We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.
-- Diana Trilling

#Forever
Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.
-- Diana Trilling

#Pathology #Ruling #Alcoholism
Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.
-- Diana Trilling

#Real #Blood #Hands
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 intellectuals I was now getting to know. They were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy. But they were intellectually energetic and - this particularly attracted me - they were proof against cant.
-- Diana Trilling

#Careers #Arrogant #May
Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.
-- Diana Trilling

#Writing #Failing
I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.
-- Diana Trilling

#Women #Laughing #Breakfast
I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.
-- Diana Trilling

#Women #World #Anxious
Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.
-- Diana Trilling

#Women #Bed #Before Marriage
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 and the Oppenheimer hearings; certainly one saw it in the trial of Oscar Wilde.
-- Diana Trilling

#Running #Defense #Trials
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 children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country.
-- Diana Trilling

#Mother #Country #Children
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 for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.
-- Diana Trilling

#Pain #Design #Attention
Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.
-- Diana Trilling

#Children #People #Neighbor
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 any of us.
-- Diana Trilling

#Class #One Day #May
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.
-- Diana Trilling

#Marriage #Couple #Errors
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 Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.
-- Diana Trilling

#Boston #East #Lace
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 to keep us at a sanitizing distance from crimes of passion.
-- Diana Trilling

#Distance #Passion #Justice
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 to know sympathy for someone who had been carried by jealousy this one terrible step too far, to murder.
-- Diana Trilling

#Jealousy #Men #Would Be
Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.
-- Diana Trilling

#People #Faces #Myth
[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured.
-- Diana Trilling

#Death #Loss #Thinking

You may also like:

Alfred Kazin
Writer
Allen Ginsberg
Poet
Dwight Macdonald
Writer
Edmund Wilson
Writer
Elizabeth Hardwick
Novelist
Germaine Greer
Journalist
Hannah Arendt
Philosopher
Irving Howe
Literary critic
Jacques Barzun
Historian
Jean Harris
Author
Jill Johnston
Author
Lillian Hellman
Author
Lionel Trilling
Literary critic
Mark Van Doren
Poet
Mary McCarthy
Author
Norman Mailer
Novelist
Norman Podhoretz
Pundit
Shana Alexander
Journalist
Whittaker Chambers
Writer
Chris Hegedus
Filmmaker