Cyril Connolly Quotes - Page 6

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.

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

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.

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.

Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.

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.

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

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.

There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

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

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

A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.

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.

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.

We fear something before we hate.

Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

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.

Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.