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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

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
Decadence
Manure
Epoch
Civilization
Becomes
Next

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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We fear something before we hate.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Cyril Connolly
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The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Cyril Connolly
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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
Cyril Connolly
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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
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That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
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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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Cyril Connolly
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
Cyril Connolly