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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

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
Class
Delirium
Literature
Slums
May
Suburbs
Wells
Grounds
Well
Breeding
Apathy
Crime
Middle

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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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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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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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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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.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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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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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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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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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities it is all they have to insure their places in the world.
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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.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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