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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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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
Every
Factors
Manure
Luxury
Epoch
Constant
Weariness
Civilization
Superstition
Becomes
Skepticism
Goal
Superstitions
Culture
Decay
Next
Corruption
Decadence

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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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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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
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Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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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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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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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
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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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
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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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
Cyril Connolly
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Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
Cyril Connolly