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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.

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

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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
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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.
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Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
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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.
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Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow.
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In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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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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The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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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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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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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.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
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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.
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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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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.
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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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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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