17 Quotes by Diana Trilling

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

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

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

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

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.

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.

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.