John Barth Quotes

I have this desire to have this immaculate form of love that really doesn't exist, so my obsession goes on through life and I never find it and I end up miserable. But it makes me a better writer.

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.

I'm not always going to keep waiting for a fairytale ending.

I was blinded by being a romantic person.

I used to be a hopeless romantic - I fell in love with everyone I went out with.

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.

If I only dated actresses, I'd be a very lonely man.

It's too heart-wrenching doing the solo thing. I throw myself into it and get so excited, and then 2000 people buy it and you're, like, 'Oh. I guess it's not that good after all.'

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

We have this idealized romanticism about how love might solve all of our problems, but then it doesn't.

I have this sense of independent heartbreak, of annulling romances before they get their feet off the ground.

nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.

The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal.

You're the light I can never have and I'm the darkness you'll never succumb to.

Of love that never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts; Or all the same as if he had not been?

Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.

Don’t you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there’s a huge possibility you’ll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn’t that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don’t you find that scary?

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

I cannot live with you, It would be life, And life is over there Behind the shelf

I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented... The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.... To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.

All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.

I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrirfied, or again later that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever. But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake.