Top 62 Trilling Quotes
#1. I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism").
Philip Kitcher
#2. Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...
From the poem 'Only For You
Munia Khan
#3. Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace.
Langston Hughes
#4. Smile.
Steel it.
Keep steeling it.
Laugh.
Trill it.
Keep trilling it.
Love.
Feel it.
Keep feeling it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#5. I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#6. The hooves of the horse! Oh! witching and sweet is the music earth steals from the iron-shod feet; no whisper of love, no trilling of bird, can stir me as hooves on the horse have stirred.
William Henry Ogilvie
#7. From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the joyous trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of the tideless sea.
Rafael Sabatini
#8. Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
Lionel Trilling
#9. Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
Lionel Trilling
#10. Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel Trilling
#11. I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.
Diana Trilling
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
Lionel Trilling
#15. 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
#16. The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.
Lionel Trilling
#17. After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.
Lionel Trilling
#18. Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting
it lives too much and I dislike its life
I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!
Lionel Trilling
#20. We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
Lionel Trilling
#22. The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Lionel Trilling
#23. Perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful ...
Lionel Trilling
#24. There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.
Diana Trilling
#25. In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.
Lionel Trilling
#26. 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
#27. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Lionel Trilling
#28. Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.
Diana Trilling
#29. Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.
Lionel Trilling
#30. Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
Lionel Trilling
#31. Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.
Diana Trilling
#32. Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity , then of our wisdom , ultimately of our coercion.
Lionel Trilling
#33. At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.
Lionel Trilling
#34. Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.
Diana Trilling
#35. 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
#36. If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.
Lionel Trilling
#37. In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
Lionel Trilling
#38. The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
Lionel Trilling
#39. Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.
Lionel Trilling
#40. Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.
Lionel Trilling
#41. Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.
Diana Trilling
#42. It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
Lionel Trilling
#43. Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.
Diana Trilling
#44. Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
Lionel Trilling
#45. The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Lionel Trilling
#46. We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
Lionel Trilling
#47. 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
#48. Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.
Lionel Trilling
#49. Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Lionel Trilling
#50. I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.
Diana Trilling
#51. We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.
Lionel Trilling
#52. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.
Lionel Trilling
#53. 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
#54. What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
Lionel Trilling
#55. Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.
Diana Trilling
#56. 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
#57. The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
Lionel Trilling
#58. This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.
Lionel Trilling
#59. I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Lionel Trilling
#60. There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
Lionel Trilling
#61. We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
Lionel Trilling
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