Cyril Connolly Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Nice, Lying

  "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly, (Part 2), 1951.

• Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

  Cyril Connolly

  Art, Past, Reality

• The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

  Cyril Connolly

  Sweet, Past, Smell

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”, HarperCollins

• 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

  Dream, Memories, Grief

• 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 discovered.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Past, Civilization

  'The Unquiet Grave' (1944) pt. 2

• No one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian.

  Cyril Connolly

  Passion, Past, Serenity

• 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.

  Cyril Connolly

  Travel, Past, Years

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.114, University of Chicago Press

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