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

Cyril Connolly

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Cyril Connolly
Age: 71 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 10
Died: 1974
Died: November 26
Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Cyril Vernon Connolly
Imagination
Snapshot
Art
Snapshots
Reality
Develops
Past
Liquid
Absent
Nostalgia
Solution
Solutions

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

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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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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.
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Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
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Melancholy and remorse forms the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality.
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The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
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We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
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The artist secretes nostalgia around life.
Cyril Connolly
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly
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In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.
Cyril Connolly
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An author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.
Cyril Connolly
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For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
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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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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.
Cyril Connolly
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Sheep with a nasty side.
Cyril Connolly
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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.
Cyril Connolly