Cyril Connolly Quotes
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Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the ...
By Cyril Connolly
Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton's Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know; is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale crush me and eat me! -- for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, tea-plant and vine perfect themselves? Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton.
By Cyril Connolly
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.
By Cyril Connolly
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.
By Cyril Connolly
We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life; it is because we tire of our responsibility.
By Cyril Connolly
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
By Cyril Connolly
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.
By Cyril Connolly
Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.
By Cyril Connolly
A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossing with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
By Cyril Connolly
We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
By Cyril Connolly
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
By Cyril Connolly
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.
By Cyril Connolly
Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.
By Cyril Connolly
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
By Cyril Connolly
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
By Cyril Connolly
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.
By Cyril Connolly
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-Pr?s: 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.
By Cyril Connolly
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
By Cyril Connolly