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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

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
Names
Literature
Coarse
Living
Idleness
Idle
Infinite
Capacity
Present
Name

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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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.
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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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When in doubt, choose greatness.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Cyril Connolly
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Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems
Cyril Connolly
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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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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Cyril Connolly
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly