If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given 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 ConnollyThe friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Cyril ConnollyCivilization 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 ConnollyBeneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.
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 ConnollyWords today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
Cyril ConnollyHate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril ConnollyFrom now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
Cyril ConnollyThe shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.
Cyril ConnollyWe create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
Cyril ConnollyThere is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
Cyril ConnollyBetter to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril ConnollyIn the sex-war, thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.
Cyril ConnollyMost people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
Cyril ConnollyToday the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril ConnollyThe 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 ConnollySlums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril ConnollyIn the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Cyril ConnollyIn the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.
Cyril ConnollyDoing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
Cyril ConnollyThere are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Cyril ConnollyIn my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.
Cyril ConnollyThe river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
Cyril ConnollyA great writer created 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 ConnollyFallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril ConnollyClassical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
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 ConnollyAs repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril ConnollyMelancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril ConnollyThe detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.
Cyril Connolly