“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.”
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Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939Related quotes
“Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance.”
Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 271
“Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us.”
Source: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), Ch. 2
Context: Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
“I think romance basically starts with respect. And new romance always starts with respect.”
Interview with Rebecca Murray http://romanticmovies.about.com/cs/lostintranslation/a/lostbillint.htm
Context: I think romance basically starts with respect. And new romance always starts with respect. I think I have some romantic friendships. Like the song “Love the One You’re With”; there is something to that. It’s not just make love to whomever you’re with, it’s just love whomever you’re with. And love can be seeing that here we are and there’s this world here. If I go to my room and I watch TV, I didn’t really live. If I stay in my hotel room and watch TV, I didn’t live today.
The scene is a society ball in London.
Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. V, p. 145.
Name for hypothetical planet nearer the Sun than Mercury
The Story of the Heavens, London, 1893, p. 122
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Useful Knowledge (1928)
“There is no greater romance in life than this adventure in realization.”
Message at Pickfair, Beverly Hills, California (1 June 1932), as quoted in Life Is A Jest (1974) edited by A. K. Hajra <!-- or 6 January? 1932 Me p100-101 -->
General sources
Context: Life becomes meaningful and all activities are purposeful only on the basis of faith in the enduring reality. … The greatest romance possible in life is to discover this Eternal Reality in the midst of infinite change. Once, one has experienced this, one sees oneself in everything that lives, one recognises all of life as his life, everybody's interests as his own. One is no longer bound by habits of the past, no longer swayed by the hopes of the future — One lives in and enjoys each present moment to the full. There is no greater romance in life than this adventure in realization.
“…girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts.”
Gavin Stevens to Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 20
The Town (1957)