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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.

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
Infatuation
Avarice
Purity
Folly
Ignorance
Darkness
Wisdom
Engenders
Passion
Infatuated

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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe.
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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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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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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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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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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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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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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
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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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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
Cyril Connolly
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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit we must sleep and therefore we must dream.
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.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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