Quotes about romance
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“This is as much a part of my story as anything else. Friendship is love as much as any romance.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Love, Friendship, Parting

“Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Thinking, Heart Touching, Romantic, Valentine's Day

“What do you do when Mom leaves you alone like this? (Kat)
I write romance novels. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Moms

“It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself”

Nick Hornby book Songbook

Source: Songbook

Music, Nature

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:
‘Er, garçon.’
‘M’sieur?’
‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous savez—et une envelope et une plume.’
The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.
‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings.
‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’
‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’
‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Luck of the Bodkins

Source: The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

World, Law, Girl, Lovers

“We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Travel

“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Thinking, Solitude

“I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Love, Imagination

“… what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.”

Zoë Heller (1965) British writer

Source: What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

Reading

“The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Idea

“Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.”

Chris Bohjalian (1962) American novelist

Source: Secrets of Eden

Food, Memory, Season

“When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: What Happens in London

“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Love, Fate, Bad luck

“Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality.

-Lady Anne, Whitney's aunt”

Judith McNaught book Whitney, My Love

Source: Whitney, My Love

Dreams, Reality, Memory, Childhood

“Everyone knows ladies love Cajuns. It's in our blood and our language is the language of romance."
"Your language is the language of bullshit. You're just a couple of good ole boys with pretty faces. Women just ought to know better.”

Christine Feehan book Night Game

Source: Night Game

Love, Women, Boy

“I am an author of Christian Fantasy. My first 7 books were Christian Romance, but I came over to the Dark Side when I heard there were cookies.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Books

“He looked as if he'd stepped straight off the cover of one of those romance novels she ordered from Amazon. com so she didn't have to be embarassed by some supercilious male clerk in the bookstore.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Kiss of the Highlander

“Summer romances end for all kinds of reasons. But when all is said and done, they have one thing in common: They are shooting stars-a spectacular moment of light in the heavens, a fleeting glimpse of eternity. And in a flash, they're gone.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Star, Light, Summer

“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 1: Levitical

Thinking, Passion

“Recovering from an ill-starred romance is, after all, to anyone of sufficient will-power and self-respect, purely an attitude of mind.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 1: Robert

Star

“For an hour Rosamond paced up and down the deck reveling in the breezy motion of the boat, the delicious sense of freedom which possessed her, the atmosphere of romance which surrounded her. Tempest lounged beside her, watching her beautiful face, listening to her happy voice, and enjoying her innocent companionship with the relish of a man eager for novelty and skillful in the art of playing on that delicate instrument, a woman's heart.”

Louisa May Alcott A Long Fatal Love Chase

A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

Happiness, Beauty, Art, Sense

“Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no [Virginias]. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

World, Faith, Sense, Light

“My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin.”

Oscar Levant book The Memoirs of an Amnesiac

The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965) http://books.google.com/books?&id=yWcIAQAAMAAJ&q=%22My+last+picture+for+Warners+was+Romance+on+the+High+Seas+It+was+Doris+Day%27s+first+picture+that+was+before+she+became+a+virgin%22&pg=PA192#v=onepage A later paraphrase of this appeared in The Wit and Wisdom of Hollywood (1972) by Max Wilk: "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."

Sea

“A true hero, after the chivalrous mediaeval type, his [Champlain's] character was dashed largely with the spirit of romance. Though earnest, sagacious, and penetrating, he leaned to the marvellous; and the faith which was the life of his hard career was somewhat prone to overstep the bounds of reason and invade the domain of fancy.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 2
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Life, Faith

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Happiness, World, Literature, Mathematics

“The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Source: Out of the East, Books and Habits, p. 23.

Beauty, Passion, Time

“On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 29
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

“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.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Love, Friendship, Family, Communication

“Jocelyne clicked her barbell on her teeth. I was watching her closely for signs of collapsing romance. Her tongue was pierced, (a process, she had elaborated, that had taken two weeks of painful healing) and it put me in mind of the tongue-piercing ceremony endured on October 28, 709 AD by the principal wife of Shield Jaguar, Blood Lord of Yaxchilan (Lintel 24); i. e. to my eye, pointless, but if it's good enough for the Mayans …
"Why did you do it?"
"To punish my tongue, for saying things it shouldn't have." Click.
"But surely it was only obeying orders?"
"It has to learn to be warier of its mistress. And it's also a symbol." Click.
"What of?"”

Tibor Fischer book The Thought Gang

"That changes from day to day. It's a multi-purpose symbol."
See wikipedia on Yaxchilan.
The Thought Gang (1994)

Pain, Learning, Change

“Things That Lose by Being Painted
Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted
Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene.”

Sei Shonagon (966–1025) Japanese author and a court lady

Source: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1002), p. 138

Women, Men, Mountain, Autumn

“All this will have left you disposed to understand one of our principal Futurist efforts, which consists of abolishing in literature the apparently indissoluble fusion of the two concepts of Woman and Beauty. This ideological a fusion has reduced all romance to a sort of heroic assault that a bellicose and lyrical male launches against a tower that bristles with enemies, a story which ends when the hero, now beneath starlight, carries the divine Beauty-Woman away to new heights. Novels such as Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo or Salammbô by Flaubert can clarify my point. It is a matter of a dominant leitmotif, already worn out, c of which we would like to disencumber literature and art in general.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1910's, Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine' 1911
Source: Poggi, Christine, and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism: An Anthology. Yale University Press, 2009. p. 89

Beauty, Art, Literature, Understanding

“I could never take a chance of losing love to find romance.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"A Man and A Woman"
Lyrics, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004)

Love, Chance

“Scholars, theologians, and even poets have yet to be able to truly describe and touch upon the beauty, romance, and magic of a relationship built on 100% authenticity.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 110

Beauty

“The truth is, sex doesn't mean that much to me now. It never did, really. It was romance I wanted, kisses and candlelight, that sort of thing. I never did dig sex very much.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

Quoted in Life https://books.google.com/books?id=77cRAQAAMAAJ&q=The+truth+is,+sex+doesn't+mean+that+much+to+me+now.+It+never+did,+really.+It+was+romance+I+wanted,+kisses+and+candlelight,+that+sort+of+thing.+I+never+did+dig+sex+very+much.&dq=The+truth+is,+sex+doesn't+mean+that+much+to+me+now.+It+never+did,+really.+It+was+romance+I+wanted,+kisses+and+candlelight,+that+sort+of+thing.+I+never+did+dig+sex+very+much.&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiO79P49ObSAhXIdSYKHQmSBYsQ6AEIGjAA, vol. 7 (1984), p. xxiv. On her marriages

Truth, Sex, Kiss

“Bewdley, as most of you know was in distant times a sanctuary town to which a man, whatever his sins, might flee and be safe from justice. So, whatever the rude waves of the outside world buffet me with more than usual vigour, I have only to remember that in Bewdley, there is sanctuary even for a Prime Minister…I have never failed to find in my own country understanding, sympathy and support, and even when life seems to most difficult and the fences in front unclimbable, I can turn back in memory and recollection to this peaceful spot by the side of the river where I first drew breath and in the memory of which I am able to draw strength. There could have been no more typical English surroundings in which to cherish the earliest memories. I remember as a child, looking up the river from the bridge into that mysterious and romantic land of Shropshire, so close to us, from which my people came only three generations before and watching the smoke of the train running along the little railway through places bearing names like Wyre Forest, Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Tenbury - names steeped in romance and redolent of the springtime of an England long ago passed but whose heritage is ours.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Bewdley (8 August 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 10-11.
1925

Life, People, World, Peace

“It is surely unnecessary to dwell on the interest and importance of a study which instructs us that every pebble we tread upon bears the impress of the Almighty's hand, and affords evidence of Creative wisdom; that every grain of sand, every particle of dust scattered by the wind, may be composed of the aggregated skeletons of beings, so minute as to elude our unassisted vision, but which possessed an organization as marvellous as our own;—a science discoveries have realized the wildest imaginings of the poet,—whose realities far surpass in grandeur and sublimity the most imposing fictions of romance;—a science whose empire is the earth, the ocean, the atmosphere, the heavens;—whose speculations embrace all elements, all space, all time;—objects the most minute, objects the most colossal;—carrying its researches into the smallest atom which the microscope can render accessible to our visual organs,—and comprehending all the phenomena in the boundless Universe, which the powers of the telescope can reveal.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Wisdom, Imagination, Reality, Study

“I tried my hand at a novel around college romance, but soon figured out I was no good at it.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

In the news

“Somewhere in Time, while it errs on the side of pretentiousness, is an absolutely honest attempt to create an old-fashioned romance. It's based on love rather than on sex or X-rated bedroom scenes. I don't know how to talk about a love story without getting all gooey about it, but the script excited me because of the situation of the leading character… His problem struck me as that of many people. They've got everything going for them, or so they say, except for a real commitment, a real love.”

Christopher Reeve (1952–2004) actor, director, producer, screenwriter

Statement of 1980, as quoted in the "Biography" at Chris Reeve Homepage http://www.chrisreevehomepage.com/biography.html

Love, People, Sex, Fashion

“The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Speech at the Juilliard School http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/nyregion/23juilliard.html (22 September 2005). 2000s

Business

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Women

“And yet — and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord alone knew how it would end. He began to pluck courage from his very melancholy, and hope from his reflexions on the transitoriness of life. He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and if that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet reward him with a better.”

John Buchan book Huntingtower

Source: Huntingtower (1922), Ch. 6

Life, Dreams, Hope, Courage

“"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. You can easily imagine how many ways this story would probably go wrong in real life, but who wants to see a movie where a Marine leans over to pick up a photo and is blown up? And a mom trying to raise her son and feed lots of hungry dogs while her abusive ex-husband gets drunk and hangs around? That kind of stuff is too close to life.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review https://web.archive.org/web/20120505180249/http://rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120418/REVIEWS/120419985/1001 of The Lucky One (18 April 2012) Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Life, Books, Dogs, Way

“Life with me and the Company has not been anything like happily ever after. Reality has a way of slow-roasting romance.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 5, “An Abode of Ravens: Headquarters” (p. 383)

Life, Way, Reality

“Poker teaches self-reliance, self-control, self-respect, self-denial, and independence. But when cards are wild or are given fictitious authority, the noble game is robbed of its romance, grace and stimulation and degenerates into a gambling scheme.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

Johnson, James W. (2002). Arizona Politicians: The Noble and the Notorious, illustrations by David `Fitz' Fitzsimmons, University of Arizona Press. p 118.

Game

“The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Memoirs (1796)

Housing

“Hollywood to me, I never get the real glamour and romance. I look at an old picture of Veronica Lake, you know, looking glamorous, and I just look at her and think, "Maybe she had her period that day."”

Tracey Ullman book Tracey Takes On...

Tracey Takes On... (1996–99)

Thinking

“We look for romance in the well-cultivated garden-plots, and when it springs out of virgin soil we are surprised, though any fool might know it was the natural place for it.”

John Buchan book The Path of the King

Prologue
The Path of the King (1921)

Fools, Spring, Nature

“America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spell still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea,—a land of romance, adventure, and gold.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. I, Ch. 3
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

World, Sea

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

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[Dn5px1.6Fs@novice.uwaterloo.ca, 1996]
1990s

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

Carole Morin British writer

Penniless in Park Lane

Love, Money

“What does a woman desire?' she asked, speaking as if to herself, and her voice was soft as she gazed over the valley. 'Men think it is a handsome face or a brisk air or a smooth tongue. And some will have it that it is a deep purse or a high station. But I think it is the honest heart that goes all the way with a woman's love. We are not so blind as to believe that the glitter is the gold. We love romance, but we seek it in its true home.”

John Buchan book Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 28 "How Three Souls Found Their Heritage"

Love, Men, Way, Home

“…women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 17; also in this chapter Gavin Stevens reflects — twice — that men are "interested in facts too".
The Town (1957)

Women, Truth

“Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the clichés of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), IV

“Why must a novel-writer be either a “realist” or a “romantist”? And, if the latter, why “romanticist” any more than “realisticist”? Why should a good novel not combine romance and reality in just proportions? Is there any reason to suppose that the one element must necessarily shut out the other?”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Reality

“These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any more than life is planned or compact. They are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction as to material, and a medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an impossible event of magic or dream may be described with such exact semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all reason”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Life, Dreams, Perfection

“To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 25
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Secret, Animals

“…women aren't interested in the romance of dreams; they are interested in the reality of facts, they don't care what facts, let alone whether they are true or not if they just dovetail with all the other facts without leaving a saw-tooth edge.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens paraphrasing Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 15
The Town (1957)

Women, Dreams, Reality

“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.”

Frederik Pohl book Gateway

Gateway (1978)

Love, Hate, Way, Personality

“Outside of God's perspective, even romance loses its significance. Not in riches or in romance do we find fulfillment, but in God.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

God

“All those years that my image on the screen as "sex goddess"—well that makes me laugh. Sex was never important to me. I'm sorry if that disappoints you, but it's true. Romance, yes. Romance was very important. But I never liked being rushed into bed, and I never allowed it. I'd put it off as long as I could and I gave in only when I was in love, or thought I was. It was always the courtship, the cuddling, and the closeness that I cared about, never the act of sex itself—with some exceptions of course. I'm not masquerading as a prude, but I've always been portrayed as a sexy woman, and that's wrong. Sensuous, yes. When I'm involved with someone I care for deeply, I can feel sensual. But that's a private matter.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On her sexuality, p. 309
Autobiography

Love, Sex, Disappointment, Feeling

“We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Balzac's Garret, p. 88
Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

People

“Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest….”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 26 : "Epper Si Muove" [this chapter title is derived from a purported comment of Galileo: Eppur Si Muove "And yet it moves."]

Way, Parting, Personality

“Yes I'm talking about this war dance
A patriotic romance
And I know all you poets
Have seen it all before
About the stirring of those young hearts
Back in the first world war”

Colin Moulding (1955) English bassist, songwriter and vocalist

"War Dance"
Nonsuch (1992)

War, World, Heart, Dance

“The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure, Education, Art, Thinking

“Soon round us spread the hills and dales,
Where GEOFFREY spun his magic tales,
And call'd them history. The land
Whence ARTHUR sprung, and all his band
Of gallant knights. Sire of romance,
Who led the fancy's mazy dance,
Thy tales shall please, thy name still be,
When Time forgets my verse and me.”

Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) British writer

Book I The Banks of the Wye http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/bkwye10.txt (1811)

History, Time, Dance, Forgetting

“If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Introduction: The Custom-House
The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Truth, Dreams

“It is an interesting law of romance that a truly strong woman will choose a strong man who disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along. Strength demands intelligence, intelligence demands stimulation, and weakness is boring. It is better to find a partner you can contend with for a lifetime than one who accommodates you because he doesn't really care. … Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing. … Spill the beans, and the conversation is history. Speak in code, with wit and challenge, and the process of decryption is like foreplay.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-winslow-boy-1999 of The Winslow Boy (28 May 1999) Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews

Law, History, Intelligence, Kiss

“I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

To Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

World, Literature, Knowledge, Reading

“He had learned that there were other ways of life from the ways of his great home. He had completed an experience. He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty and the ugliness, the ice and the fire of it on his tongue and in his blood he could begin again.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 68, section 3 (p. 737)

Life, Beauty, Way, Home

“Romance is all about making a story out of our love”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

Interview with Adrian Comeau, artist and brother.
I Am Other People

Love

“Romance at short notice was her speciality.”

Saki book Beasts and Super-Beasts

"The Open Window"
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)

“The city and the crowd unidealise love; and love, in the young warm heart of a girl, should be a dream apart from all commoner emotions — as sweet and as ethereal as the blush with which it is born and dies. Beauty gives its own gracefulness to love — there must be romance blended with the passion inspired by the very lovely face which the mirror reflected.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Other Gift Books

Love, Beauty, Dreams, Girl

“This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, Happiness, Nature, Winter

“One curve corresponds to the curvature of Mars on a scale of 1:1000, another curve to Venus on a scale of 1:40.000 [named after the Roman Gods of Love and War, probably alluding to her starting romance with Gerhard Richter ]”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

Quote of Genzken in: 'Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting', by Dietmar Elger, University of Chicago Press 2009, p. 252
concept-text in 1980, for the commissioned decoration - together with Gerhard Richter - of the the multilevel U-bahn (subway) At König-Heinrich-Platz in Duisburg
1990 - 2000

Love, God, War

“I think I had been badly affected by.... the romance of Abstract Expressionism... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like 'Art News' and 'Arts', which I read religiously.. I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

reacting on a question about 'gesture' panting
Quote in: Frank Stella, William S. Rubin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 13
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Art, Way, Feeling, Idea

“I actually have a lot of couples coming and telling me that one of my songs was instrumental in strengthening their romance.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

When talked about Valentine's Day plans http://www.timesofindia.com/entertainment/hindi/music/news/The-use-of-vulgar-lyrics-in-songs-is-a-disturbing-trend-Shreya-Ghoshal/articleshow/29714772.cms

“Romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard is so old now — some say a year old, some say even two. How can the children be expected to remember?”

Eleanor Farjeon book Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1922)

Children

“Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

An American and France (1936)

Distant

“"Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance." … What excellent advice it is, and how it was beaten into my generation of schoolboys… But one may tire of even the best advice, as one may tire of writing according to these precepts. Would we wish to be without the heraldic splendour and torchlight processions that are the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne? Would we wish to sacrifice the orotund, Latinate pronouncements of Samuel Johnson? Would we wish that Dickens had written in the style recommended by the brothers Fowler, who framed the rules I have quoted; what would then have happened to Seth Pecksniff, Wilkins Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, I ask you?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Writing (1990), he here quotes from The King's English (1906) by Henry Watson Fowler & Francis George Fowler

Quotes

“This Knight was indeede a valiant Gent: but not a little given to romance, when he spake of himselfe.”

John Evelyn (1620–1706) writer, gardener and diarist

September 6, 1651.
The Diary

“While I was never over-romanced by the West Point graduate, at the same time, I always felt, by God, a West Pointer ought to be damn good.”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

Source: The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 22

God, Time

“A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children – letter to Lucy (11 September 1958)

Life, Flowers, Thinking

“Anyone who has read Yeats’s wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo—shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy’s misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: “When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Development of Yeats’s Sense of Reality”, p. 89
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Happiness, People, Boy, Passion

“…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.”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

Interview with Adrian Comeau.
I Am Other People

Drink, Loneliness

“Now as the Paradisiacal pleasures of the Mahometans consist in playing upon the flute and lying with Houris, be mine to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

To Mr. West, Letter iv, Third Series; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Pleasure, Lying, Reading

“The superiority of the woman was not a fancy but a fact. Man's business was to fight, or hunt, or feast or make love. The man was also the travelling partner in commerce, commonly absent from home for months together, while the woman carried on the business. The woman ruled the household and the workshop; cared for the economy; supplied the intelligence and dictated the taste. Her ascendancy was secured by her alliance with the Church, into which she sent her most intelligent children; and a priest or clerk, for the most part, counted socially as a woman. Both physically and mentally the woman was robust, as the men often complained, and she did not greatly resent being treated as a man. Sometimes the husband beat her, dragged her about by the hair, locked her up in the house; but he was quite conscious that she always got even with him in the end. As a matter of fact, probably she got more than even. On this point, history, legend, poetry, romance, and especially the popular Fabliaux,— invented to amuse the gross tastes of the coarser class,— are all agreed, and one could give scores of volumes illustrating it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Love, Men, Children, Making love

“I used to feel that women were here for one reason. Sex was simply another kind of exercise, another body function. I was convinced a girl and I couldn't communicate on equal footing because she wouldn't understand what I was doing. I didn't have time to take one girl out regularly and go through a normal high-school romance with all its phone calls and notes and squabbles. That took too much time. I needed to be in the gym. For me it was a simple matter of picking them up at the lake, and then never seeing them again.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/067122879X (1977), New York: Simon & Schuster. 1970s, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder (1977)

Women, School, Sex, Feeling

“It has often been asserted that the polytheistic Hindu failed to establish a spiritual kinship with the monotheistic Muslim who held much that is Indian in scorn and still seeks his spiritual inspiration abroad. How can we say that India ignored the teachings of Islam when we find saints like Nanak and Chaitanya, Namdev and Tukaram, preaching the brotherhood of man and the futility of caste in matters spiritual? Although attempts on Hindu culture and institutions fill the pages of Indian history, how can we assert that Muslims ignored the appeal of Hindu culture when we find Muhammad Jayasi weaving a beautiful romance to illustrate the teachings of Hindu philosophy, when we read the simple devotional hymns of Kabir and Sheikh Farid, who refused to recognise the barriers of caste and creed on the high road to God’s kingdom? “Utter not one disagreeable word,” said Farid, “since the true lord is in all men. Distress no one’s heart for every heart is a precious jewel.” In the same strain did Kabir proclaim, “There is the same God for the Hindu as for the Muslim.””

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

A rejuvenated India found an Akbar to put an end to political chaos and social disharmony and a Shah Jahan to dream a dream in marble the like of which is not to be met in the world.
Speech delivered at Patna University Convocation on 27th November 1937.

Men, God, World, Beauty

“He used a name for himself, true, but we played at Romance, and this is a game where truth is a bagatelle.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Madouc (1989), Chapter 8, section 5 (p. 904)

Truth, Game

“…girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens to Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 20
The Town (1957)

Women, Girl

“Thoughtful consideration has led me to decide that romance, involving as it does the highly complex interaction of human neurochemisty{sic} with cultural and technological factors, is hard SF. Very hard SF because romance is especially difficult to mentally simulate accurately, not easy-peasy like rocket science. Romance as hard SF may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the counterintuitive results of modeling that are often the most interesting outcomes.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

review of Don't Fear the Reaper, by Zen Cho http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/dont-fear-the-reaper, 2016 2010s

Science

“A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 29

Men, Family, Nature, Problem

“So Marigold, my love, you've had too much to drink

And I need not remind you, our discount tickets for this sinking ship

Take-backs and sweet regrets, that's all that we have left

No one is looking out for anyone but number one

One to one, two to dance, we all get our sweet romance

Though sour grapes will turn to wine it's all just vinegar with time”

Tomas Kalnoky (1980) American musician

"The Receiving End of it All" from "Somewhere in the Between" (2007) http://risc.perix.co.uk/lyrics/sm/sitb/09/

Love, Drink, Wine, Time

“I think that it’s a very smart decision actually to have women that are capable and intelligent because it appeals to women. You know, so it’s not only a film for fifteen-year-old boys. It’s a film that can relate to a lot of people on a lot of levels. A lot of my girlfriends like it because of the romance or like Scarlett is in the trailer and it is appealing. 'Ooh who is she?”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

and it doesn’t look gratuitous. It looks like there are interesting women in the movie. Of her role in Iron Man 2; Teen Hollywood http://www.teenhollywood.com/2010/05/03/interview-gwyneth-and-scarlett-iron-mans-ladies (3 May 2010)

Women, People, Intelligence, Boy