Quote

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.

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
Anxiety
Late
Waiting
Wish
Symbolically
Keep
Punctual
May
Assume
People
Dues
Assuming

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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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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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Sheep with a nasty side.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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From now on - specialize never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
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There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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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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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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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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In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
Cyril Connolly
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly
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The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a raw and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.
Cyril Connolly