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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.

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
Needs
Prison
People
Places
Civilization
Blot
Number
Prisons
Numbers
Maintained
Small
Altogether
Literature
Bombs
Need
Terrorism

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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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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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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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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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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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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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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 reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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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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It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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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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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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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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