Cowardice in living

Cowardice in living: without health and courage we cannot face the present or the germ of the future in the present, and we take refuge in evasion. Evasion through comfort, through society, through acquisitiveness, through the book-bed-bath defence system, above all through the past, the flight to the romantic womb of history, into primitive myth-making.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 75