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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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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
Unions
Whether
Tightens
Perfect
Strung
Woman
Bends
Men
String
Like
Bows
Strings
Union

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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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How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
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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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From now on - specialize never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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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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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 man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
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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.
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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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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.
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We fear something before we hate.
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The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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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.
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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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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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