Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 6

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• Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Selfish, Boredom, Bitterness

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

  5 Copy quote

• When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Dark, Purple

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.3, University of Chicago Press

  5 Copy quote

• Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

  Cyril Connolly

  Arguing, Poet, Modern

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• He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

  Cyril Connolly

  Art, Blow, Noses

  68 Copy quote

• The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.

  Cyril Connolly

  War, World, Able

  1944 The Unquiet Grave, pt.2.

  5 Copy quote

• Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.

  Cyril Connolly

  Eye, Facts, Tomorrow

  5 Copy quote

• Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Years, Promise

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.109, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

• If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

  Cyril Connolly

  Morning, Lying, Night

  Cyril Connolly (1946). “The Condemned Playground”

  7 Copy quote

• The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.

  Cyril Connolly

  Veins, Lessons

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.36, University of Chicago Press

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• The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.

  Cyril Connolly

  Stupid, Intelligent, Thinking

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

  7 Copy quote

• In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream, Years, Self

  8 Copy quote

• The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.

  Cyril Connolly

  Stupid, Power, Bored

  8 Copy quote

• The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

  Cyril Connolly

  Rivers, Sitting, Tipping

  16 Copy quote

• In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

  Cyril Connolly

  Emotional, Feelings, Unbearable

  4 Copy quote

• In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.

  Cyril Connolly

  Together, Drink, Believer

  4 Copy quote

• Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

  Cyril Connolly

  Passion, Ignorance, Darkness

  23 Copy quote

• The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

  Cyril Connolly

  Peeking, Lamps, Way

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• Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.

  Cyril Connolly

  Hate, Long, Literature

  Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Travel, Past, Years

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

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• It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

  Cyril Connolly

  Believe, Beer, Over You

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• Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

  Cyril Connolly

  Revenge, Intelligence, Intellectual

  Cyril Connolly (1975). “The evening colonnade”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.

  Cyril Connolly

  Fall, Men, Eden

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• That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.

  Cyril Connolly

  New York, Men, Economic

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• The greatest problem with women is how to contrive that they should seem our equals

  Cyril Connolly

  Problem, Should, Seems

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

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• The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.

  Cyril Connolly

  Pain, Golden Moments, Pleasure

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.38, University of Chicago Press

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