Quote

We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

Cyril Connolly

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
Equipped
Perfectly
Loving
Love

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
Image
If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
Cyril Connolly
Image
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
Image
English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
Cyril Connolly
Image
How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
Image
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly