Quote

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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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
Help
Reform
Tranquility
Night
Selfish
Wound
Dream
Exists
Bitterness
Form
Empty
Beneath
Scab
Nothing
Except
Mask
Scabs
Made
Habit
Boredom
Vacuous
Dreams
Pull
Ridden
Suffering
Wounds
Frivolous

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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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 goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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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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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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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
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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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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
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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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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
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Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly