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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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
Thing
Smells
Cynical
Smell
Sweet
Dead
Literature
Past

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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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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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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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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When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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We create the world in which we live if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
Cyril Connolly
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
Cyril Connolly
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
Cyril Connolly
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly