Diana Trilling

Quotes by Diana Trilling

• In paradoxical fashion she had always been a woman who easily made friends and yet was friendless.

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• It's impossible to get a recognizable sandwich in the vicinity of this court or an unadorned piece of meat or fish. Order a tuna on rye, and no doubt it'll be topped with melted cheese and a maraschino cherry.

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• There are people who were born to stay home rather than follow the beckonings of their imagination: the Emma Bovarys and Anna Kareninas of this world.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• I began to think of F. Scott Fitzgrald, the only writer this country had ever produced who knew to the last dollar and cent the moral worth of money.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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