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

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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
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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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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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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.
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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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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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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