Cyril Connolly

Big Frank has been reading "The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle" by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly). Hemingway described the book in this way: "A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough." Big Frank concurs.

Here are a few choice quotations to mull over. There are lots more, . . . maybe later:

"Three faults, which are found together and which infect every activity: laziness, vanity, cowardice. If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom. Yet it is only the thinking which begins when habit-thinking leaves off which is ignited by the logic of the train of thought, that is worth pursuing. A comfortable person can seldom follow up an original idea any further than a London pigeon can fly."

"Further considerations on cowardice, sloth and vanity; vices which do small harm to other people but which prevent one from doing any good, and which poisen and enfeeble all the virtues. Sloth rots the intelligence, cowardice destroys all power at the source, while vanity inhibits us from facing any fact which might teach us something; it dulls all other sensation."

"And 'living from beauty': in one lovely place always pining for anyother; with the perfect woman imagining one more perfect; with a bad book unfinished beginning a second, which the almond tree is in blossom, the grasshopper fat and the winter night disquieted by the plock and gurgle of the sea, - that too would seem extinct forever."