Cyril Connolly, (1903-1974), British Critic Quotes
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we learn to walk.
The secret of happiness is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm, always lucid, always willing "to be joined to the universe without being more conscious of it than an idiot," to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
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.
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God, he is a disappointing God.
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.
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.
When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton's Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know; is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale crush me and eat me! -- for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, tea-plant and vine perfect themselves? Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton.