17 Quotes by Diana Trilling

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one’s life without a sense of time is to squander it.

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

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

There’s much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

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.

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.

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.

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