Cyril Connolly - The Unquiet Grave (1945)

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

Cyril Connolly
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication, that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Cyril Connolly
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.

Cyril Connolly
Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

Cyril Connolly
There 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 will be 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. Analyse in this way the hatred of ideas or of the kind of people whom we have once loved and whose faces are preserved in Spirits of Anger. Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

Cyril Connolly
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.

Cyril Connolly
Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.

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.

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

Cyril Connolly
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

Cyril Connolly
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.

Cyril Connolly
We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.

Cyril Connolly
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Cyril Connolly
Beneath 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 Connolly
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

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

Cyril Connolly
It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

Cyril Connolly
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
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Cyril Connolly
Ridiculous as may seem the dualities of conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. The 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 Connolly
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.

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

Cyril Connolly
The boredom of Sunday afternoon, which drove de Quincey to drink laudanum, also gave birth to surrealism: hours propitious for making bombs.

Cyril Connolly
Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.

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, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. Neurotics are heartless.

Cyril Connolly
Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.

Cyril Connolly
Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.

Cyril Connolly
Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.

Cyril Connolly
In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?

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

Cyril Connolly