Quote

The 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 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
Artist
Following
Falls
Moments
Flow
Parties
Art
Laughing
River
Brambles
May
Heard
Holes
Picnic
Sometimes
Dark
Near
Picnics
Party
Architecture
Underground
Moment
Rivers
Rapids
Fall
Surface
Hole

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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
Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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
When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Cyril Connolly
Image
How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
Image
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly