"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."
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Source: Diana Trilling (1993). “The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling”, Harcourt
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"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."
"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."
"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."
"Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people."