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The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

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
Success
Wash
Littles
Shore
Little
Wave
Always
Calm
Life
Harmony
Existence
Secret
Literature
Farther

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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
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The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
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Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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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.
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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.
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
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The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
Cyril Connolly