quotations about romance
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain--and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.
O. HENRY
"The Green Door"
Romance is like fireworks in the dark night, thrilling but inevitably transitory. We are lucky if we can simply get along.
STEPHEN A. MITCHELL
Can Love Last?
Everybody everybody ooh (ooh), alright (alright)
Dance, music, sex, romance
PRINCE
"D.M.S.R."
Romances paint at full length people's wooings,
But only give a bust of marriages:
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings.
There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss.
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance
LADY GAGA
"Bad Romance"
I'm an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can "keep the romance alive" in their marriages. This stumps me a little because, by "romance," I know they mean the traditional version, the one that depends on living inside a giant, suspenseful question mark. This version of romance is all about that thrilling moment when you think that someone may have just materialized who will make every single thing in the world feel delicious and amazing and right forever and ever.
HEATHER HAVRILESKY
"What Romance Really Means After 10 Years of Marriage", New York Magazine, February 9, 2016
There will always be romance in the world, so long as there are young hearts in it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.
UMBERTO ECO
The Island of the Day Before
Romance is nothing more than savoring your partner and the gifts of your intimate relationship. From that place of savoring, from that place of gratefulness, you give back. You slow down and nurture your partner. You slow down and get in touch with what makes your partner's heart sing.
TODD CREAGER
"What Is Romance?", The Good Men Project, October 2, 2017
Romance is a fragile and endangered condition.
STEPHEN A. MITCHELL
Can Love Last?
And time time is gone
It never lasts
Stops who it wants
Well I was wrong
It never lasts
This is no
There is no
Modern romance
YEAH YEAH YEAHS
"Modern Romance"
The culmination of romance is terminal. Or so it is viewed by romantics, by those who can see no further.
M. C. DILLON
Beyond Romance