“…There’s a romance to danger. There’s a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the STORY of our lives better.”

“Lust is temporary, romance can be nice, but love is the most important thing of all. Because without Love, lust and romance will always be short-lived.”

“The romance genre was all around us. There was love story pulps, and there was love story sections in the newspapers. There was love stories in the movies. Wherever you went there was love stories! That’s how we got our new material, and it suddenly struck me that that’s what we haven’t done. We haven’t done any romance stories!”

“Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.”

“I fell in love with money before I had any and it’s a myth that the best romances end in heartbreak.”

“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”

“I no longer think being in love is the polar opposite of being alone, however. I say that because I used to want to be in love again as I assumed this was the opposite of loneliness. I think being in love is an opposite of loneliness, but not the opposite. There are other things I now crave when I am lonely, like community, like friendship, like family. I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can't possibly carry all that we want it to.”

“Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story.”

“For the most part, romance novels are stories about women finding and taking up space for themselves. And not just taking up space, but daring to find happiness. And yes, romance novels are about the fantasy—the heterosexual fantasy—of having the perfect relationship with a man, but it’s also about women taking power over their sexuality, women taking control over their lives, women making themselves vulnerable to all the intimacies of love…”

“All romances end at marriage.”