“While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”
Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
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Cyril Connolly 49
British author 1903–1974Related quotes

“A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's.”
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck. He can be dragged down from the mast and put to tending the boilers or working the capstan, but that will not change anything: the mast will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen.
In a storm, you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of storm today, and SOS signals come from every side.

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

Source: Quoted in Melodrama after the tears, ed. Jörg Metelmann and Scott Loren (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 178

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness
Source: God of the Oppressed (1975, 1997), p. 98-99 (1975 edition)

“To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence.”
Smashing Pumpkins (1996)

"Why Read New Books?" The New York Review of Books (11 November 2014).