Time & Perspective Quote by Lionel Trilling

Trilling’s line lands with the cool precision of a critic who knows that reading is never just intake; it’s self-assembly. Youth, for him, isn’t sentimentalized as innocence or limitless possibility. It’s the season when you encounter books that feel like fate, then later abandon them for work, status, irony, or simply the need to keep moving. The sting is in the second clause: we “give up” these books, but we “do not get over” them. The verbs sketch a whole biography of compromise. Giving up is an action, almost a betrayal; not getting over is a lingering condition, like a half-healed wound or a first love you claim you’ve outgrown.

The intent is double-edged. Trilling is diagnosing how intellectual life is shaped as much by renunciation as by discovery. Those early books act as private measuring sticks. Even when you stop rereading them, they keep judging you from the shelf: did you become the person they made you want to be, or the person the world rewarded? Subtextually, he’s also skeptical of the adult habit of treating youthful passions as embarrassing phases. The culture loves the narrative of maturation as replacement - new tastes, new politics, new sophistication. Trilling suggests something less tidy: that the books that mattered first remain formative precisely because they are unreconciled.

Context matters: as a mid-century American critic, Trilling watched “serious” literature become both canon and credential. His sentence quietly resists that professionalization. It’s not about the books you cite; it’s about the ones you can’t quite stop arguing with inside your own head.