Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 7

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• When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

  Cyril Connolly

  Men, Years, Garbage Cans

  8 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

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

  Cyril Connolly

  Running, Taken, Air

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.107, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

• In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.

  Cyril Connolly

  Friendship, Girl, Cousin

  8 Copy quote

• The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

  Cyril Connolly

  Artist, Nostalgia

  5 Copy quote

• No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

  Cyril Connolly

  Birthday, Wisdom, Book

  4 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Love

  7 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Faithful, Literature, Loyal

  8 Copy quote

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

  Cyril Connolly

  Wine, Sun, Taught

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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