Cyril Connolly Quotes
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Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.
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There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
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The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.
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English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
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Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
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Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.
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The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.
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If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are; like fishes not meant to swim.
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A woman's desire for revenge outlasts all her other emotions.
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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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Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
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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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In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the ichneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.
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There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.
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When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
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He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
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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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In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other's affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.
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It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.
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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.
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No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
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Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.
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Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."
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