Cyril Connolly Past Quotations

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

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

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

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.

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.