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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.

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
Imagination
Snapshot
Art
Snapshots
Reality
Develops
Past
Liquid
Absent
Nostalgia
Solution
Solutions

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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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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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Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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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.
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Sheep with a nasty side.
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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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It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.
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Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
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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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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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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.
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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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