The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet. - Cyril Connolly

Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers but we venture out in weather that would sink them and we choose our direction.

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p.115)

Early laurels weigh like lead and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton, I can say that their lives are over .... Once again romanticism with its death wish is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption.