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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
Name
Names
Literature
Coarse
Living
Idleness
Idle
Infinite
Capacity
Present

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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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When in doubt, choose greatness.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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We may assume that we keep people waiting symbolically because we do not wish to see them and that our anxiety is due not to being late, but to having to see them at all.
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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.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
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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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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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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly