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A Mutually Fulfilled Sexual Union Between Two People Is The Rarest Sensation Which Life Can Provide. But It Is Not Quite Real. It Stops When The Telephone Rings. Such A Passion Can Be Kept At Its Early Strength Only By Adding To It Either More And More Unhappiness (jealousy, Separation, Doubt, Renunciation), Or More And More Artificiality (drink, Technique, Stage-illusions). Whoever Has Missed This Has Never Lived, Who Lives For It Alone Is But Partly Alive.

-Cyril Connolly

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A Mutually Fulfilled Sexual

Cyril Connolly

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A Mutually Fulfilled Sexual Union Between Two People Is The Rarest Sensation Which Life Can Provide. But It Is Not Quite Real. It Stops When The Telephone Rings. Such A Passion Can Be Kept At Its Early Strength Only By Adding To It Either More And More Unhappiness (jealousy, Separation, Doubt, Renunciation), Or More And More Artificiality (drink, Technique, Stage-illusions). Whoever Has Missed This Has Never Lived, Who Lives For It Alone Is But Partly Alive.

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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.

In Youth The Life Of Reason Is Not In Itself Sufficient; Afterwards The Life Of Emotion, Except For Short Periods, Becomes Unbearable.

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.

Melancholy And Remorse Forms The Deep Leaden Keel Which Enables Us To Sail Into The Wind Of Reality.

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?

The Civilization Of One Epoch Becomes The Manure Of The Next.

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.

The Civilized Are Those Who Get More Out Of Life Than The Uncivilized, And For This We Are Not Likely To Be Forgiven.

We Love But Once, For Once Only Are We Perfectly Equipped For Loving.

The Artist Is A Member Of The Leisured Classes Who Cannot Pay For His Leisure.

Most Of The Beauty Of Women Evaporates When They Achieve Domestic Happiness At The Price Of Their Independence.

We Create The World In Which We Live; If That World Becomes Unfit For Human Life, It Is Because We Tire Of Our Responsibility.

No-one Was Ever Made Wretched In A Brothel.

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The Man Who Is Master Of His Passions Is Reason's Slave.

A Great Writer Created A World Of His Own And His Readers Are Proud To Live In It. A Lesser Writer May Entice Them In For A Moment, But Soon He Will Watch Them Filing Out.

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.

Civilization Is Maintained By A Very Few People In A Small Number Of Places And We Need Only Some Bombs And A Few Prisons To Blot It Out Altogether.

Like Water, We Are Truest To Our Nature In Repose.

A Lazy Person, Whatever The Talents With Which He Set Out, Will Have Condemned Himself To Second-hand Thoughts And To Second-rate Friends.

While Thoughts Exist, Words Are Alive And Literature Becomes An Escape, Not From, But Into Living.

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?

For What Is Liberty But The Unhampered Translation Of Will Into Act?

The Dread Of Loneliness Is Greater Than The Fear Of Bondage, So We Get Married.

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.

Literature Is The Art Of Writing Something That Will Be Read Twice; Journalism What Will Be Grasped At Once.

Like Those Crabs Which Dress Themselves With Seaweed, We Wear Belief And Custom.

Youth Is A Period Of Missed Opportunities.

Missed Opportunity

When In Doubt, Choose Greatness.

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.

Greed, Like The Love Of Comfort, Is A Kind Of Fear.

Doing Is Overrated, And Success Undesirable, But The Bitterness Of Failure Even More So.

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.

In My Religion All Believers Would Stop Work At Sundown And Have A Drink Together.

Industrial Society Seems Likely To Be Entering A Period Of Severe Stress, Due In Part To Problems Of Human Behavior And In Part To Economic And Environmental Problems

There Is No Pain Equal To That Which Two Lovers Can Inflict On One Another... It Is When We Begin To Hurt Those Whom We Love That The Guilt With Which We Are Born Becomes Intolerable, And Since All Those Whom We Love Intensely And Continuously Grow Part Of Us, And Since We Hate Ourselves In Them, So We Torture Ourselves And Them Together.

Vulgarity Is The Garlic In The Salad Of Charm.

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.

Believing In Hell Must Distort Every Judgement On This Life.

We Fear Something Before We Hate.

M Is For Marx And Clashing Of Classes And Movement Of Masses And Massing Of Asses.

The Headmistress Was An Able Instructress In French And History And We Learned With Her As Fast As Fear Could Teach Us.

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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.

Slums May Well Be Breeding Grounds Of Crime, But Middle Class Suburbs Are Incubators Of Apathy And Delirium.

Delirium Tremens

What Grape To Keep Its Place In The Sun, Taught Our Ancestors To Make Wine?

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Poets Arguing About Modern Poetry: Jackals Snarling Over A Dried-up Well.

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Sheep With A Nasty Side.

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Idleness Is Only A Coarse Name For My Infinite Capacity For Living In The Present.

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Bad Relationship

Miserable Orpheus Who, Turning To Lose His Eurydice, Beholds Her For The First Time As Well As The Last.

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When We Have Ceased To Love The Stench Of The Human Animal, Either In Others Or In Ourselves, Then Are We Condemned To Misery, And Clear Thinking Can Begin.

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Fallen Leaves Lying On The Grass In The November Sun Bring More Happiness Than The Daffodils.

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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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No Taste Is So Acquired As That For Someone Else's Quality Of Mind.

Imagination Is Nostalgia For The Past, The Absent It Is The Liquid Solution In Which Art Develops The Snapshot Of Reality.

The Secret Of Success Is To Be In Harmony With Existence, To Be Always Calm To Let Each Wave Of Life Wash Us A Little Farther Up The Shore.

The Greatest Problem With Women Is How To Contrive That They Should Seem Our Equals

The Artist Secretes Nostalgia Around Life.

Longevity Is The Revenge Of Talent Upon Genius.

Green Leaves On A Dead Tree Is Our Epitaph-green Leaves, Dear Reader, On A Dead Tree.

Boys Do Not Grow Up Gradually. They Move Forward In Spurts Like The Hands Of Clocks In Railway Stations.

Like The Bee Its Sting, The Promiscuous Leave Behind Them In Each Encounter Something Of Themselves By Which They Are Made To Suffer.

A Woman's Desire For Revenge Outlasts All Her Other Emotions.

Beautiful Women Must Think About Their Beauty As Capitalists Think About Their Investments Or Politicians About Their Majorities; It Is All They Have To Insure Their Places In The World.

Promise Is The Capacity For Letting People Down.

He [george Orwell] Would Not Blow His Nose Without Moralising On Conditions In The Handkerchief Industry.

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.

Nothing Dates Like Hate And In Literature A Little Of It Goes A Very Long Way.

There Are Many Who Dare Not Kill Themselves For Fear Of What The Neighbours Will Say.

A Life Based On Reason Will Always Require To Be Balanced By An Occasional Bout Of Violent And Irrational Emotion, For Instinctual Drives Must Be Satisfied

When Even Despair Ceases To Serve Any Creative Purpose, Then Surely We Are Justified In Suicide.

It Is A Mistake To Expect Good Work From Expatriates For It Is Not What They Do That Matters But What They Are Not Doing.

There Are Only Three Things Which Make Life Worth Living: To Be Writing A Tolerably Good Book, To Be In A Dinner Party Of Six, And To Be Traveling South With Someone Whom Your Conscience Permits You To Love.

Flaubert Spoke True: To Succeed A Great Artist Must Have Both Character And Fanaticism And Few In This Country Are Willing To Pay The Price. Our Writers Have Either No Personality And Therefore No Style Or A False Personality And Therefore A Bad Style; They Mistake Prejudice For Energy And Accept The Sensation Of Material Well-being As A System Of Thought.

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.

The Only Happy Talkers Are Dandies Who Extract Pleasure From The Very Perishability Of Their Material And Who Would Not Be Able To Tolerate The Isolation Of All Other Forms Of Composition; For Most Good Talkers, When They Have Run Down, Are Miserable; They Know That They Have Betrayed Themselves, That They Have Taken Material Which Should Have A Life Of Its Own, To Dispense It In Noises Upon The Air.

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."

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.

The English Language Is Like A Broad River On Whose Bank A Few Patient Anglers Are Sitting, While, Higher Up, The Stream Is Being Polluted By A String Of Refuse-barges Tipping Out Their Muck.

The True Work Of Art Is The One Which The Seventh Wave Of Genius Throws Up The Beach Where The Undertow Of Time Cannot Drag It Back.

Optimism And Self-pity Are The Positive And Negative Poles Of Modern Cowardice.

A Mutually Fulfilled Sexual Union Between Two People Is The Rarest Sensation Which Life Can Provide. But It Is Not Quite Real. It Stops When The Telephone Rings. Such A Passion Can Be Kept At Its Early Strength Only By Adding To It Either More And More Unhappiness (jealousy, Separation, Doubt, Renunciation), Or More And More Artificiality (drink, Technique, Stage-illusions). Whoever Has Missed This Has Never Lived, Who Lives For It Alone Is But Partly Alive.

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.

No City Should Be Too Large For A Man To Walk Out Of In A Morning.

In My Religion, There Would Be No Exclusive Doctrine; All Would Be Love, Poetry, And Doubt.

Life Is A Maze In Which We Take The Wrong Turning Before We Have Learned To Walk.

Only By Avoiding The Beginning Of Things Can We Escape Their End.

When Young We Are Faithful To Individuals, When Older We Grow Loyal To Situations And To Types.

Always Be Nice To Those Younger Than You, Because They Are The Ones Who Will Be Writing About You.

We May Assume That We Keep People Waiting Symbolically Because We Do Not Wish To See Them And That Our Anxiety Is Due Not To Being Late, But To Having To See Them At All.

It Is After Creation, In The Elation Of Success, Or The Gloom Of Failure, That Love Becomes Essential.

An Author Arrives At A Good Style When His Language Performs What Is Required Of It Without Shyness.

Today The Function Of The Artist Is To Bring Imagination To Science And Science To Imagination, Where They Meet, In The Myth.

Hemingway Is Great In That Alone Of Living Writers He Has Saturated His Work With The Memory Of Physical Pleasure, With Sunshine And Salt Water, With Food, Wine And Making Love And The Remorse Which Is The Shadow Of That Sun.

When I Write After Dark The Shades Of Evening Scatter Their Purple Through My Prose.

Everyone Has The Right To Express An Opinion. No One Has The Right To Be Listened To.

Obesity Is A Mental State, A Disease Brought On By Boredom And Disappointment.

Better To Write For Yourself And Have No Public, Than To Write For The Public And Have No Self.

I Review Novels To Make Money, Because It Is Easier For A Sluggard To Write An Article A Fortnight Than A Book A Year, Because The Writer Is Soothed By The Opiate Of Action, The Crank By Posing As A Good Journalist, And Having An Air Hole. I Dislike It. I Do It And I Am Always Resolving To Give It Up.

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.

Approaching Forty, I Had A Singular Dream In Which I Almost Grasped The Meaning And Understood The Nature Of What It Is That Wastes In Wasted Time.

In The Sex War, Thoughtlessness Is The Weapon Of The Male, Vindictiveness Of The Female.

That Sinister Stonehenge Of Economic Man, Rockefeller Center.

The Worst Vice Of The Solitary Is The Worship Of His Food.

It Is Only In The Country That We Can Get To Know A Person Or A Book.

The Past Is The Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet.

Hate Is The Consequence Of Fear; We Fear Something Before We Hate; A Child Who Fears Noises Becomes The Man Who Hates Them.

The Books I Haven't Written Are Better Than The Books Other People Have.

The Detective Story Itself Is In A Dilemma. It Is A Vein Which Is In Danger Of Being Worked Out, The Demand Is Constant, The Powers Of Supply Variable, And The Reader, With Each One He Absorbs, Grows A Little More Sophisticated And Harder To Please, While The Novelist, After Each One He Writes, Becomes A Little More Exhausted.

No One Can Achieve Serenity Until The Glare Of Passion Is Past The Meridian.

The American Language Is In A State Of Flux Based Upon Survival Of The Unfittest.

The Expulsion From Eden Is An Act Of Vindictive Womanish Spite; The Fall Of Man, As Recounted In The Bible, Comes Nearer To The Fall Of God.

Those Of Us Who Were Brought Up As Christians And Have Lost Our Faith Have Retained The Sense Of Sin Without The Saving Belief In Redemption. This Poisons Our Thought And So Paralyses Us In Action.

Our Memories Are Card Indexes Consulted And Then Returned In Disorder By Authorities Whom We Do Not Control.

Words Today Are Like The Shells And Rope Of Seaweed Which A Child Brings Home Glistening From The Beach And Which In An Hour Have Lost Their Luster.

The Reward Of Art Is Not Fame Or Success But Intoxication.

Civilization Is An Active Deposit Which Is Formed By The Combustion Of The Present With The Past. Neither In Countries Without A Present Nor In Those Without A Past Is It To Be Encountered. Proust In Venice, Matisse's Birdcages Overlooking The Flower Market At Nice, Gide On The Seventeenth-century Quais Of Toulon, Lorca In Granada, Picasso By Saint-germain-des-prés: There Lies Civilization And For Me It Can Exist Only Under Those Liberal Regimes In Which The Present Is Alive And Therefore Capable Of Assimilating The Past.

Hate Is Crystallized Fear, Fear's Dividend, Fear Objectivized. We Hate What We Fear And So Where Hate Is, Fear Will Be Lurking.

How Many Books Did Renoir Write On How To Paint?

As Repressed Sadists Are Supposed To Become Policemen Or Butchers So Those With An Irrational Fear Of Life Become Publishers.

Publishing Books

Whom The Gods Wish To Destroy They First Call Promising.

A Mistake Which Is Commonly Made About Neurotics Is To Suppose That They Are Interesting. It Is Not Interesting To Be Always Unhappy, Engrossed With Oneself, Malignant And Ungrateful, And Never Quite In Touch With Reality.

We Must Select The Illusion Which Appeals To Our Temperament, And Embrace It With Passion, If We Want To Be Happy.

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.

We Cannot Be Happy Until We Can Love Ourselves Without Egotism And Our Friends Without Tyranny.

There Cannot Be A Personal God Without A Pessimistic Religion. As Soon As There Is A Personal God He Is A Disappointing God.

All Charming People Have Something To Conceal, Usually Their Total Dependence On The Appreciation Of Others.

It Is Significant Comment On The Victory Of Science Over Magic That Were Someone To Say ‘if I Put This Pill In Your Beer It Will Explode,’ We Might Believe Them; But Were They To Cry ‘if I Pronounce This Spell Over Your Beer It Will Go Flat,’ We Should Remain Incredulous And Paracelsus, The Alchemists, Aleister Crowley And All The Magi Have Lived In Vain. Yet When I Read Science I Turn Magical; When I Study Magic, Scientific.

Young Writers If They Are To Mature Require A Period Of Between Three And Seven Years In Which To Live Down Their Promise. Promise Is Like The Mediaeval Hangman Who After Settling The Noose, Pushed His Victim Off The Platform And Jumped On His Back, His Weight Acting A Drop While His Jockeying Arms Prevented The Unfortunate From Loosening The Rope. When He Judged Him Dead He Dropped To The Ground.

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.

Everything Is A Dangerous Drug Except Reality Which Is Unendurable.

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.

A Writer Is In Danger Of Allowing His Talent To Dull Who Lets More Than A Year Go Past Without Finding Himself In His Rightful Place Of Composition, The Small Single Unluxurious Retreat Of The Twentieth Century, The Hotel Bedroom.

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