Cyril Connolly quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Cyril Connolly

Top Cyril Connolly Quotes

Browse top 51 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Cyril Connolly.

Favorite Cyril Connolly Quotes

1. "While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living." ~ Cyril Connolly

2. "Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform." ~ Cyril Connolly

3. "When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide. For what better grounds for suicide can there be than to go on making the same series of false moves which invariably lead to the same disaster and to repeat a pattern without knowing why it is false or wherein lies the flaw? And yet to percieve that in ourselves revolves a cycle of activity which is certain to end in paralysis of the will, desertion, panic and despair - always to go on loving those who have ceased to love us, and who have quite lost all resemblance to the selves who we loved! Suicide is infectious; what if the agonies which suicide endure before they are driven to take their own life, the emotion of 'all is lost' - are infectious too?" ~ Cyril Connolly

4. "Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control." ~ Cyril Connolly

5. "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

6. "We are captivated by the feminine shadow of the self we might have been; in my case by that counterpart of the romantic writer who should have had the courage to reject society and to accept poverty for the sake of the development of his personality. Now when I see such beings I hope that I can somehow be freed from my shortcomings by union with them. Hence the recurrent longing to forsake external reality for a dream and to plunge into a ritual flight...I am attracted by those who mysteriously hold out a promise of the integrity which I have lost." ~ Cyril Connolly

7. "Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is." ~ Cyril Connolly

8. "Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable." ~ Cyril Connolly

9. "Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over .... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption." ~ Cyril Connolly

10. "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

11. "La cultura europea ha sido muy fértil en la invención de infiernos." ~ Cyril Connolly

12. "A love affair is a grafting operation. "What has once been joined never forgets". There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years." ~ Cyril Connolly

13. "The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife." ~ Cyril Connolly

14. "A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends." ~ Cyril Connolly

15. "We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving." ~ Cyril Connolly

16. "The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore." ~ Cyril Connolly

17. "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." ~ Cyril Connolly

18. "Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you." ~ Cyril Connolly

19. "All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others." ~ Cyril Connolly

20. "Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear." ~ Cyril Connolly

21. "We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy." ~ Cyril Connolly

22. "Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise." ~ Cyril Connolly

23. "Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium." ~ Cyril Connolly

24. "Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action." ~ Cyril Connolly

25. "The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven." ~ Cyril Connolly

26. "Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once." ~ Cyril Connolly

27. "The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above." ~ Cyril Connolly

28. "In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female." ~ Cyril Connolly

29. "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

30. "Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness." ~ Cyril Connolly

31. "The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence." ~ Cyril Connolly

32. "When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types." ~ Cyril Connolly

33. "As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers." ~ Cyril Connolly

34. "A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out." ~ Cyril Connolly

35. "A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent." ~ Cyril Connolly

36. "Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether." ~ Cyril Connolly

37. "It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book." ~ Cyril Connolly

38. "Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising." ~ Cyril Connolly

39. "No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating." ~ Cyril Connolly

40. "A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: "It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates." ~ Cyril Connolly

41. "A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive." ~ Cyril Connolly

42. "If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are—like fishes not meant to swim." ~ Cyril Connolly

43. "...there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay." ~ Cyril Connolly

44. "A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom." ~ Cyril Connolly

45. "Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away." ~ Cyril Connolly

46. "No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life." ~ Cyril Connolly

47. "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

48. "While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)" ~ Cyril Connolly

49. "Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity" ~ Cyril Connolly

50. "The artist secretes nostalgia around life." ~ Cyril Connolly

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You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you."
Author: C.S. Lewis

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