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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

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
Crabs
Custom
Customs
Dress
Dresses
Wear
Belief
Like
Seaweed

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Cyril Connolly
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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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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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Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness.
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Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.
Cyril Connolly
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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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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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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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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?
Cyril Connolly
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Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
Cyril Connolly
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A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
Cyril Connolly
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Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body.
Cyril Connolly
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The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
Cyril Connolly