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Food
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The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
-Cyril Connolly
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Friends
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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.
-Cyril Connolly
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God
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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.
-Cyril Connolly
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Greed
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Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
-Cyril Connolly
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Grief, Grieving
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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.
-Cyril Connolly
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Hate
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Nothing dates like hate and in literature a little of it goes a very long way.
-Cyril Connolly
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Illusion
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We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
-Cyril Connolly
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Insanity
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A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossing with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.
-Cyril Connolly
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Laziness
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A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.
-Cyril Connolly
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Life
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.
-Cyril Connolly
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Love
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We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
-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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Marriage
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Except for poverty, incompatibility, opposition of parents, absence of love on one side and of desire to marry on both, nothing stands in the way of our happy union.
-Cyril Connolly
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
-Cyril Connolly
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The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
-Cyril Connolly
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Masses
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The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.
-Cyril Connolly
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Memory
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Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
-Cyril Connolly
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Men & Women
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In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
-Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1944
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Past, the
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
-Cyril Connolly, quoted in Journals and Memoirs by David Pryce-Jones
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Potential
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Promise is the capacity for letting people down.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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Praise
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Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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Prison
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
-Cyril Connolly
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of taste.
-Cyril Connolly
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Reason
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The person who is master of their passions is reason's slave.
-Cyril Connolly
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Responsibility
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We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life; it is because we tire of our responsibility.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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Books by and about Cyril Connolly