Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 6

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• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sick, Misery, Forget

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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

  10 Copy quote

• There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream, Memories, Grief

  4 Copy quote

• We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.

  Cyril Connolly

  People, Waiting, Anxiety

  61 Copy quote

• An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.

  Cyril Connolly

  Scandal, Publicity, Movement

  5 Copy quote

• It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

  Cyril Connolly

  Mistake, Literature, Matter

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

  8 Copy quote

• What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

  Cyril Connolly

  Wine, Sun, Taught

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• Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

  Cyril Connolly

  Nature, Men, Literature

  9 Copy quote

• Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Art, Past, Reality

  14 Copy quote

• When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.

  Cyril Connolly

  Faithful, Literature, Loyal

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• We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

  Cyril Connolly

  Love

  7 Copy quote

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