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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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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
Wisdom
Teach
Five
Meeting
Learn
Birthday
Book
Thirty
Something
Meetings
Teaching
Worth

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.
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.
Cyril Connolly
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
Cyril Connolly
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Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
Cyril Connolly
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Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
Cyril Connolly
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
Cyril Connolly
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Cyril Connolly
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Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.
Cyril Connolly
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
Cyril Connolly
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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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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
Cyril Connolly