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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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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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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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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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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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Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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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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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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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
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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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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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Marriage is the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone until death breaks the record.
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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.
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
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The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
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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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