Quote

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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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
Party
Architecture
Underground
Moment
Rivers
Rapids
Fall
Surface
Hole
Artist
Following
Falls
Moments
Flow
Parties
Laughing
River
Brambles
Art
Heard
Holes
Picnic
May
Dark
Near
Picnics
Sometimes

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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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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 I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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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.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
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I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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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.
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