romance quotes

There may be trouble ahead But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance Let's face the music and dance

- Irving originally Israel Baline Berlin
  'Let's Face the Music and Dance', in the film Follow the Fleet.

This knight was indeed a valiant Gent: but not a little given to romance, when he spake of himself.

-John Evelyn
  Diary entry, 6 Sep.

I might as well play bridge with my old maid aunts I haven't got a chance This is a fine romance.

- Dorothy Fields
  'A Fine Romance', song featured in the film Swing Time (music by  Jerome Kern).

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables, preface.

When I behold, upon the night's starred face Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness so sink.

-John Keats
  'When I Have FearsThat I May Cease to Be'.

Mandalay has its name; the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance.

-W(illiam) Somerset Maugham
  The Gentleman in the Parlour.

Venice will linger in your mind†and wherever you go in life you will feel somewhere over your shoulder, a pink, castellated, shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinnacles of the Serenissima. There's romance for you! There's the lust and dark wine of Venice! No wonder George Eliot's husband fell into the Grand Canal.

-Jan formerly James Morris Morris
  Venice.

No philosopher now looks for anything but the gradual evolutionoftheneworder fromtheold†Historyshows us no example of the sudden substitutions of Utopian and revolutionary romance.

- SidneyJames Webb
  Fabian Essays.