Trilling Quotes & Sayings

Immature artists imitate.
Mature artists steal. — Lionel Trilling

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers. — Lionel Trilling

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

An early fly landed on Mara's eyelid.
She shooed it off with a dozy paw as she awakened to peachgold dawn stealing softly over the sleeping dunes.The land lay in a pool of serinity;the sand,now still and cool,awaited sun-warmed day.Somewhere a lark began trilling as it fluttered its morning ascent into the airy heights. — Brian Jacques

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have. — Lionel Trilling

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy. — Lionel Trilling

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals. — Lionel Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...

From the poem 'Only For You — Munia Khan

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature. — Lionel Trilling

Smile.
Steel it.
Keep steeling it.

Laugh.
Trill it.
Keep trilling it.

Love.
Feel it.
Keep feeling it. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The hooves of the horse! Oh! witching and sweet is the music earth steals from the iron-shod feet; no whisper of love, no trilling of bird, can stir me as hooves on the horse have stirred. — William Henry Ogilvie

When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically. — Louis Menand

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood. — Lionel Trilling

The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal. — Lionel Trilling

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. — Lionel Trilling

It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God ," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow. — Lionel Trilling

The house was an immense place, isolated in a great wooded area. The building and the trees seemed wet, glistening dimly in the grey morning light that was much like the light of midday of Anthea. It was refreshing to his over-sensitive eyes. He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people..... — Walter Tevis

Perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful ... — Lionel Trilling

[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured. — Diana Trilling

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it. — Lionel Trilling

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. — Lionel Trilling

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly. — Lionel Trilling

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. — Jean Arp

Good evening, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace. — Langston Hughes

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him. — Lionel Trilling

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. — Lionel Trilling

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. — Lionel Trilling

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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. — Diana Trilling

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason. — Lionel Trilling

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. — Aaron Shurin

I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but perhaps, above all literary critics, I'm indebted to Wayne Booth (several people have suggested to me that I'm trying to reinvent "ethical criticism"). — Philip Kitcher

Consistent affection for his characters is what sets Tolstoy apart. Flaubert is equally "objective," he says, but "Flaubert's objectivity is charged with irritability and Tolstoy's with affection. For Flaubert everyone and everything is somehow at fault. For Tolstoy everyone and everything has a saving grace."
"By loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them." It would be hard to find a more succinct description of the chief work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart. — Lionel Trilling

After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain. — Lionel Trilling

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

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness. — Lionel Trilling

Nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history - our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar. — Lionel Trilling

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like. — Lionel Trilling

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity , then of our wisdom , ultimately of our coercion. — Lionel Trilling

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader
it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting
it lives too much and I dislike its life
I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much! — Lionel Trilling

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

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself. — Lionel Trilling

At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be. — Lionel Trilling

But the life he now led no longer resonated with the echo of past moments of exhilaration, other than the trilling of birds at dawn, or the grand calligraphy of clouds. Therefore, when the little girl began to play, the pain he felt courted a sorrow he no longer knew still lived inside him, a brief reminiscence of the cruelty of pleasure. — Muriel Barbery

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God ; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity , for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him in fact , he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's. — Lionel Trilling

From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the joyous trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of the tideless sea. — Rafael Sabatini

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination. — Lionel Trilling

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession. — Lionel Trilling

I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc. — Lionel Trilling

Our culture tends "to regard the mere energy of impulse as being in every mental and moral way equivalent and even superior to defined intention." Instead we should consider "an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of "making a life", by which was meant conceiving human existence, one's own or another's, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment ... This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self. — Lionel Trilling

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

Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:
I HARDLY HEAR THE PURLIEU CRY
OR A TOMMY TALK AS I PASS ONE BY
BEFORE MY THOUGHTS BEGIN TO RUN
ON F. M'CURDY ATKINSON,
THE SAME THAT HAD THE WOODEN LEG
AND THAT FILIBUSTERING FILIBEG
THAT NEVER DARED TO SLAKE HIS DROUTH,
MAGEE THAT HAD THE CHINLESS MOUTH.
BEING AFRAID TO MARRY ON EARTH
THEY MASTURBATED FOR ALL THEY WERE WORTH.
Jest on. Know thyself. — James Joyce

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. — Lionel Trilling

I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom's answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.
"Oh, of course!" Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. "How could I have forgotten?"
And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don't know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not. — Beth Revis

Man ... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has ... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love ... — Lionel Trilling

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. — Lionel Trilling

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

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian. — Lionel Trilling

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over. — Lionel Trilling

Slowly rising from the fire, she went down to the shore, and not wanting to frighten him off again, she squatted on a rock above the water, looking down at him where he sat on the wet sand with his long blue-green tail disappearing into the lapping waves. He shyly offered the bag up to her, which had been woven of seaweed, and she took it with a whispered thanks and opened it, staring in delight and surprise at the sheer amount of oysters that were inside.
The siren made a trilling noise and whispered, "I-I hope it is well enough. I do not know what land women eat. — Ash Gray

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. — Diana Trilling

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty. — Lionel Trilling

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it. — Diana Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write. — Diana Trilling

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. — Lionel Trilling

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony. — Lionel Trilling

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language. — Lionel Trilling

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. — Lionel Trilling

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life. — Lionel Trilling

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health. — Lionel Trilling

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. — Lionel Trilling

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty. — Lionel Trilling

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

We have all in some degree become anarchistic. — Lionel Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. — Lionel Trilling

The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility. — Lionel Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man. — Lionel Trilling

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. — Diana Trilling

This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking. — Lionel Trilling

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals. — Diana Trilling

Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues. — Lionel Trilling

Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity , and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it. — Lionel Trilling

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