The Unquiet Grave Quotes

“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“...art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide. For what better grounds for suicide can there be than to go on making the same series of false moves which invariably lead to the same disaster and to repeat a pattern without knowing why it is false or wherein lies the flaw? And yet to percieve that in ourselves revolves a cycle of activity which is certain to end in paralysis of the will, desertion, panic and despair - always to go on loving those who have ceased to love us, and who have quite lost all resemblance to the selves who we loved! Suicide is infectious; what if the agonies which suicide endure before they are driven to take their own life, the emotion of 'all is lost' - are infectious too?”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“No opinions, no ideas, no real knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration; a fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass; a stump, a decaying belly washed up on the shore... Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“...there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: "It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; — such is our personality.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are—like fishes not meant to swim.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“The artist secretes nostalgia around life.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“We are captivated by the feminine shadow of the self we might have been; in my case by that counterpart of the romantic writer who should have had the courage to reject society and to accept poverty for the sake of the development of his personality. Now when I see such beings I hope that I can somehow be freed from my shortcomings by union with them. Hence the recurrent longing to forsake external reality for a dream and to plunge into a ritual flight...I am attracted by those who mysteriously hold out a promise of the integrity which I have lost.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“A love affair is a grafting operation. "What has once been joined never forgets". There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.

The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. A personal God is a disappointing God; and Job, Omar Khayyam, Euripides, Palladas, Voltaire and Professor Housman will denounce him. With Buddhism, Taoism, Quietism, and the God of Spinoza there can be no disappointment, because there is no Appointment.”
― Palinurus, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked; we pay for pleasure when we find out too late that we are nothing.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”
― Palinurus, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“There was once a man (reputed to be the wisest in the world) who, although living to an untold age, confined his teaching to the one word of advice: ‘Endure!’ At length a rival arose and challenged him to a debate which took place before a large assembly. ‘You say “Endure”,’ cried the rival sage, ‘but I don’t
want to endure. I wish to love and to be loved, to conquer and create, I wish to know what is right, then do it and be happy.’ There was no reply from his opponent, and, on looking more closely at the old creature, his adversary found him to consist
of an odd-shaped rock on which had taken root a battered thorn that presented, by an optical illusion, the impression of hair and a beard. Trimnphantly he pointed out the mistake to the authorities, but they were not concerned. ‘Man or rock,’ they answered, ‘what does it matter?’ And at that moment the wind,
reverberating through the sage’s moss-grown orifice, repeated with a hollow sound: ‘Endure!”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave : A Word Cycle by Palinurus

“Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine.”
― Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus