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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.

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
Choose
Alternatives
Stupid
Latter
Undignified
Serious
Attractive
Sighted
Everybody
False
Invariably
Law
Noble
Apes
Two
English
Vulgar
Like
Intelligent
Cynical
Short
Sincere

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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 woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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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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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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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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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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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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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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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.
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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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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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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?
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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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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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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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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
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