Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril ConnollyIf one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.
Cyril ConnollyWhile thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril ConnollyWere I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
Cyril Connolly