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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

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
Youth
Emotional
Emotion
Unbearable
Becomes
Afterwards
Feelings
Sufficient
Reason
Periods
Life
Except
Short

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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.
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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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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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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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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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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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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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid one attractive, one vulgar one noble, one ape-like one serious and sincere, one undignified and false one far-sighted, one short EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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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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