Diana Trilling Quotes

#1. Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.

Diana Trilling

#2. Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.

Diana Trilling

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.

Diana Trilling

#6. 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

#7. Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

Diana Trilling

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.

Diana Trilling

#13. There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

Diana Trilling

#14. 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

#15. Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.

Diana Trilling

#16. Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.

Diana Trilling

#17. Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

Diana Trilling