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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

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
Many
Neighbor
Suicide
Dare
Kill
Crazy
Neighbours
Funny
Neighbour
Fear
Suicidal
Death
Mad

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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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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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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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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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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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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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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.
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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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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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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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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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Cyril Connolly
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
Cyril Connolly
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In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly