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

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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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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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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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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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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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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.
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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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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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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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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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