Diana Trilling Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: we do and feel what our societies ask us to, and the demands put upon us are not always consistent or precisely correlated with biology.

Diana Trilling
Seventeen years have now passed since Lionel's death, and hour by hour, minute by minute I still listen for a clock which no longer ticks.

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

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

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

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

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

Diana Trilling
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