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Cyril Connolly citations
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Cyril Vernon Connolly est un écrivain et critique littéraire britannique.

✵ 10. septembre 1903 – 26. novembre 1974   •   Autres noms Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly photo
Cyril Connolly: 49   citations 0   J'aime

Cyril Connolly: Citations en anglais

“Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 24: Vale (p. 253)

“He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.”

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Cyril Connolly

On his friend, George Orwell, in The Sunday Times (1968-09-29); reprinted in The Evening Colonnade (New York, 1973)

“We write in the language of Dryden and Addison, of Milton and Shakespeare, but the intellectual world we inhabit is that of Flaubert and Baudelaire; it is to them, and not to their English contemporaries, that we owe our conception of modern life. The artist whose reward is perfection and where perfection can be obtained only by a separation of standards from those of the non-artist is led to adopt one of four rôles: the High Priest (Mallarmé, Joyce, Yeats), the Dandy (Firbank, Beerbohm, Moore), the Incorruptible Observer (Maugham, Maupassant) or the Detached Philosopher (Strachey, Anatole France). What he will not be is a Fighter or Helper.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 4: The Modern Movement (p. 30)

“Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.”

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Cyril Connolly livre The Unquiet Grave

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 91)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“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.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 136-137)

“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.”

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Cyril Connolly livre The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 62)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.”

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Cyril Connolly

"Told in Gath" (a parody of Aldous Huxley)
The Condemned Playground (1945)

“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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Cyril Connolly livre The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 6)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 2: The Mandarin Dialect (p. 13)

“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 14: The Charlock’s Shade (p. 116)

“Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up — execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.”

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Cyril Connolly

The Observer (1937-03-07)

“I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 1: The Next Ten Years (p. 5)

“It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 136)

“Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.”

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Cyril Connolly livre The Unquiet Grave

Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 37)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”

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Cyril Connolly

Edward Thomas, "Early One Morning" from Poems (1917) http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/thomas04.html#five
Misattributed

“Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?”

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Cyril Connolly livre Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 15: The Slimy Mallows (p. 122-123)

“Peace … is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.”

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Cyril Connolly

"What Will He Do Next?" (a lampoon on military analysis)
The Condemned Playground (1945)

“Dry again?”

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Cyril Connolly livre The Unquiet Grave

said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.'
Part I: Ecce Gubernator (p. 11)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”

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Cyril Connolly livre The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

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