Cyril Connolly Quotes

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.115)

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.

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.103)

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.

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 98)

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.

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 93)

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.

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 91)

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

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

The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.

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.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

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