Daily Inspiration Quote by Cyril Connolly

Memory, in Connolly's hands, stops being a cozy attic of keepsakes and turns into a bureaucracy with bad lighting. The image is pointedly unromantic: a "card index" suggests something once prized for order and retrieval, the pre-digital promise that the past can be filed, found, and verified. Then comes the twist that gives the line its bite: the cards get handed back "in disorder" by "authorities whom we do not control". Connolly doesn't just doubt memory's accuracy; he mocks our faith that we are the competent librarians of our own lives.

The specific intent is to puncture the liberal, self-help-ish idea that knowing yourself is a matter of looking inward and taking inventory. For Connolly, introspection is less a private act than an encounter with an internal civil service: habits, defenses, desires, and half-buried shame deciding what gets stamped, what gets misplaced, what gets "lost" for your own good. "Consulted" is clinical, almost official, as if remembering were a procedure rather than a feeling; "returned" implies you don't keep the file, you merely borrow it, and even that on someone else's terms.

Context matters: Connolly, a mid-century British critic and journalist, wrote in an era newly saturated with Freud, propaganda, and the hard lesson that narrative can be engineered. His metaphor captures a modern suspicion: the self isn't sovereign. It's an office where the clerks improvise, and the record you build your identity on arrives already scrambled.