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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

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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
Woman
Bends
Men
String
Like
Bows
Strings
Union
Unions

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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.
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
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The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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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.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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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.
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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.
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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