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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.

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
Love
Equipped
Perfectly
Loving

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly
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No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
Cyril Connolly
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
Cyril Connolly
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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Cyril Connolly
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We create the world in which we live if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
Cyril Connolly
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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
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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
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Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly