quotations about romance
Romance is a prelude to sexlove, an opening gambit, an intense period of hope and despair, an invocation of higher powers: foreplay. As such, it always has a sequel, a next act: the crescendo culminates, and the music takes on a different tempo. The mistake of our age is to mistake the prelude for the symphony.
M. C. DILLON
Beyond Romance
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps ... perhaps ... love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.
L. M. MONTGOMERY
Anne of Avonlea
My romance doesn't have to have a moon in the sky
My romance doesn't need a blue lagoon standing by
No month of May, no twinkling stars
No hide away, no softly guitars
My romance doesn't need a castle rising in Spain
Nor a dance to a constantly surprising refrain
Wide awake I can make my most fantastic dreams come true
My romance doesn't need a thing but you
ELLA FITZGERALD
"My Romance"
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Cheap romance, it's all just a crutch.
You don't want nothin' that anybody can touch.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"The Ties That Bind", The River
Hmmm ...
A fine romance, my good fellow
You take romance, I'll take jello
MARILYN MONROE
"(This Is) A Fine Romance"
In the ballroom of romance, there's a rock band playing,
People swaying to the beat, swaying in the heat,
In the corner over there by the door is a local Casanova,
Yelling for another double scotch, "hey, steady on the rocks!"
And when the girl walked in, a complete unknown,
There was mass confusion, this beauty was alone,
And then the room began to shimmer,
Every heart was beating fast,
Every man who had to win her,
Was moving fast, they said
I'm ready, I'm ready for romance,
I'm ready for romance is here at last.
CHRIS DE BURGH
"The Ballroom of Romance"
A fiction romance
I love this love story
That never seems to happen in my life
BUZZCOCKS
"Fiction Romance"
In this commonplace world, everyone is said to be romantic who either admires a fine thing or does one.
ALEXANDER POPE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Once more the spring of a new Renaissance of Human Nature is upon us. It is the fashion to be young, and the age of romance both for men and women has been indefinitely extended. No one gives up the game, or is expected to, till he is genuinely tired of playing it. Mopish conventions are less and less allowed to restrict that free and joyous play of vitality dear to the modern heart, which is the essence of all romance. More and more the world is growing to love a lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"Modern Aids to Romance", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
Like obsession, romance is not always an innocent, empowering pastime. It teaches us relentlessly to define ourselves by outside standards, making our central measure of self being desirable for someone else or being in a constant state of desiring.
PATRICIA MELLENCAMP
A Fine Romance: Five Ages of Film Feminism
Romance is everything.
GERTRUDE STEIN
A Gertrude Stein Companion
Yes, romance, we not infrequently hear, is dead. Modern science has killed it. It is essentially a "thing of the past"--an affair presumably of stage-coaches, powdered wigs, and lace ruffles. It cannot breathe in what is spoken of as "this materialistic age." The dullards who repeat these platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out of court as not to be worth controverting, except for the opportunity they give one of confidently making the joyous affirmation that, far from romance being dead in our day, there never was a more romantic age than ours, and that never since the world began has it offered so many opportunities, so many facilities for romance as at the present time.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"Modern Aids to Romance", Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
A crucial ingredient of the rapture of romance is the sense that the object of desire is no ordinary person but someone very special, someone unique. There is a certain magic to romance, according to the common lore of love, a spell, that infatuates, that transforms mundane, expectable reality into something transcendent.
STEPHEN A. MITCHELL
Can Love Last?
The essence of romance is an unshakable conviction that next time will be different.
GLEN COOK
Soldiers Live
Parent of golden dreams, Romance!
Auspicious queen of childish joys,
Who lead'st along, in airy dance,
Thy votive train of girls and boys.
LORD BYRON
"To Romance"
Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else's dream.
RICHELLE MEAD
Succubus Blues
Long-married romance is not the romance of watching someone's every move like a stalker, and wanting to lick his face but trying to restrain yourself. It's not even the romance of "Whoa, you bought me flowers, you must REALLY love me!" or "Wow, look at us here, as the sun sets, your lips on mine, we REALLY ARE DOING THIS LOVE THING, RIGHT HERE." That's dating romance, newlywed romance. You're still pinching yourself. You're still fixated on whether it's really happening. You're still kind of sort of looking for proof. The little bits of proof bring the romance. The question of whether you'll get the proof you require brings the romance. (The looking for proof also brings lots of fights, but that's a subject for another day.) After a decade of marriage, if things go well, you don't need any more proof. What you have instead -- and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all -- is this palpable, reassuring sense that it's okay to be a human being.
HEATHER HAVRILESKY
"What Romance Really Means After 10 Years of Marriage", New York Magazine, February 9, 2016
It's bullshit to think of friendship and romance as being different. They're not. They're just variations of the same love. Variations of the same desire to be close.
RACHEL COHN
Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List