Quote

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

Cyril Connolly

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Absent
Nostalgia
Solution
Solutions
Imagination
Snapshot
Art
Snapshots
Reality
Develops
Past
Liquid

More quotes by Cyril Connolly

Image
The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization the factors of decadence, -- luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition, -- are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
Cyril Connolly
Image
If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.
Cyril Connolly
Image
How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?
Cyril Connolly
Image
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
Cyril Connolly
Image
We cannot be happy until we can love ourselves without egotism and our friends without tyranny.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.
Cyril Connolly
Image
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Cyril Connolly
Image
The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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.
Cyril Connolly
Image
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
Image
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
Image
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Cyril Connolly
Image
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
Cyril Connolly