romantic quotes

A romantic interest in our own sex, not necessarily carried as far as physical experiments, was the intellectual fashion.

- Cyril Vernon Connolly
Of Oxfordduring his student days. Quotedin Peter Quennell The Marble Foot (1977).

   New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To thinkof 'living'there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live'at Xanadu.

-Joan Didion
  'Goodbye To  All That', collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

   A poet is a person who thinks there is something special about a poet and about his loving one unattainable woman.You'll usually find he takes the physical out on whores. I am defining a romantic poetand there is no other kind. An unromantic poet is a self-contradiction.

- Robert Lee Frost
  Letter to Louis Untermeyer, 6  Jun.

Klassisch ist das Gesunde, romantisch das Kranke. The classical period was healthy; the romantic diseased.

-JohannWolfgang von Goethe
  Spru«  che in Prosa, Maximen und Reflexionen, pt.7.

He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, 'The very rich are different from you and me.'And somebody had said to Julian,'Yes, they have more money.' See Fitzgerald 325:3.

- Ernest Millar Hemingway
  'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', in Esquire,  Aug. In the original version'Julian' was named as F Scott Fitzgerald, but the pseudonym was used for book publication in The Fifth Column and Other Stories (1938).

The same costume will be Indecent†10 years before its time Shameless†5 years before its time Outre   (daring)†1year before its time Smart Dowdy†1year after its time Hideous†10 years after its time Ridiculous†20 years after its time Amusing†30 years after its time Quaint†50 years after its time Charming†70 years after its time Romantic†100 years after its time Beautiful†150 years after its time.

-James Laver
  Taste and Fashion, ch.18.

Men are so romantic, don't you think? They look for a perfect partner when what they should be looking for is perfect love.

- Fay originally Franklin Birkinshaw Weldon
  In the SundayTimes, 6 Sep.

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'September1913', refrain. Collected in Responsibilities (1914).