Quote

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

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
Whether
Tightens
Perfect
Strung
Bends
Woman
String
Men
Bows
Like
Strings
Union
Unions

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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
Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems
Cyril Connolly
Image
Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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
There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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
Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
Image
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly
Image
That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
Cyril Connolly