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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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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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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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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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Greatness & Great Things
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Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
original French: Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d
-Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way, 1921
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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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Success & Failure
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I
-James Atlas, My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor
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Authors & Writing
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If you don
-James Atlas, essay: The Fall of Fun, "The New Yorker", November, 1996
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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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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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