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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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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
People
Intelligent
Writer
Stupid
Firsts
Severe
First
Discovering
Time
Shock
Think
Stupidity
Thinking
Younger

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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
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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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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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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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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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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.
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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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We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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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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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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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
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.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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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 civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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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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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
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