Cyril Connolly Quotes
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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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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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Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.
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Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
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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 no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.
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No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
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Ridiculous as may seem the dualities of conflict at a given time, it does not follow that dualism is a worthless process. The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
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Destroy him as you will, the bourgeois always bounces up - execute him, expropriate him, starve him out en masse, and he reappears in your children.
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The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.
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Miserable Orpheus who, turning to lose his Eurydice, beholds her for the first time as well as the last.
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Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
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Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.
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Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
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The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
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I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
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'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.'
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So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.
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No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
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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.