Diana Trilling Quotes

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.