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No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.

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
Meridian
Glare
Tranquility
Serenity
Achieve
Passion
Past

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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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When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
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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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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
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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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No-one was ever made wretched in a brothel.
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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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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
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The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
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Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
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Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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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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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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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Cyril Connolly