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 TrillingLiterature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
Lionel TrillingI find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
Lionel TrillingAny 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