Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 2

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• Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.

  Cyril Connolly

  Ends, Avoiding

  7 Copy quote

• Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

  Cyril Connolly

  Class, Delirium Tremens, Apathy

  14 Copy quote

• It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

  Cyril Connolly

  Love Is, Essentials, Elation

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.136, University of Chicago Press

  21 Copy quote

• There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

  Cyril Connolly

  Party, Book, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

  Cyril Connolly

  Friendship, Respect, Lasts

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  9 Copy quote

• Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Nice, Lying

  "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

  32 Copy quote

• Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

  Cyril Connolly

  Life, Mazes, Walks

  26 Copy quote

• Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

  Cyril Connolly

  Funny, Beauty, Beautiful

  5 Copy quote

• Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.

  Cyril Connolly

  Appreciation, Hands, People

  Cyril Connolly (1960). “Enemies of promise and other essays: an autobiography of ideas”

  8 Copy quote

• Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

  Cyril Connolly

  Believe, Judgement, Atheism

  6 Copy quote

• An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Style, Language

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.17, University of Chicago Press

  6 Copy quote

• It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

  Cyril Connolly

  Infidelity, Age, Causes

  14 Copy quote

• While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

  Cyril Connolly

  Alive, Literature

  29 Copy quote

• There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream, Children, Hate

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  15 Copy quote

• There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

  Cyril Connolly

  Funny, Death, Suicide

  The Unquiet Grave Pt II

  37 Copy quote

• The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

  Cyril Connolly

  Civilization, Luxury, Goal

  16 Copy quote

• A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Weed, Lying, Flower

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  9 Copy quote

• In the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sex, Revenge, War

  15 Copy quote

• Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

  Cyril Connolly

  Names, Literature, Infinite

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1984). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”

  12 Copy quote

• As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

  Cyril Connolly

  Life, Fear, Publishing Books

  Enemies of Promise (1938) ch. 10

  25 Copy quote

• Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

  Cyril Connolly

  Science, Artist, Technology

  9 Copy quote

• The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.

  Cyril Connolly

  Passion, Men, Slave

  7 Copy quote

• Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sadness, Reality, Wind

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

  5 Copy quote

• The books I haven't written are better than the books other people have.

  Cyril Connolly

  Work, Book, Writing

  12 Copy quote

• The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

  Cyril Connolly

  Love, Dream, Lonely

  "Phil Spector: What I've Learned", www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

  12 Copy quote

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