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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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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
Thinking
Either
Animal
Literature
Clear
Stench
Others
Ceased
Human
Condemned
Humans
Misery
Love
Begin

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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
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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.
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It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
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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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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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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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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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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
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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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
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We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
Cyril Connolly
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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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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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