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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.

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
Christian
Poison
Lost
Christians
Sense
Saving
Action
Brought
Paralyses
Thought
Atheism
Retained
Without
Sin
Poisons
Belief
Paralysis
Faith
Redemption

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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
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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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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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From now on - specialize never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
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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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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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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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If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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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 reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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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.
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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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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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