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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.

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
Melancholy
Sadness
Forms
Misery
Leaden
Deep
Keel
Wind
Remorse
Reality
Enables
Form
Sail

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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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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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A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
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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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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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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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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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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.
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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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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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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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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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
Cyril Connolly
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
Cyril Connolly
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The lesson one can learn from Firbank is that of inconsequence. There is the vein which he tapped and which has not yet been fully exploited.
Cyril Connolly
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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.
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