Romanticization Quotes

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.

She was not an adventure, she was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.

I know people sometimes have this fantasy about Cornwall. But the Cornish are so grounded.

Sweet is war to those who know it not.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else.

People always want to romanticize relationships within bands. Most of these relationships are based on music first.

When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman.

There is a tendency to over-exaggerate and over-romanticise the place of a writer in a revolution. That bothers me. I think it's inappropriate.

We tend to do period stuff because it helps make it one step removed from boring everyday reality.

I have somebody I admire and want to keep at a distance. I've had the opportunity to meet her a couple of times - it's Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders. I just am nuts about her, but I have no interest in meeting her because I just don't think she could live up to what she's been to me in my head.

That was part of her, and you used to know it. It's like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

When young people see movies like 'Gandhi 'or 'JFK,' there is an element of romanticization of these powerful people, and young people often feel a huge distance between their own lives and the lives of these social-change heroes. But the Panthers were flawed-up people from the streets, so it's easier to identify with them.

In 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes).

In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.

When I was younger, I did self-mutilate. I'd be upset, so I'd do it, & it would calm me down. It's a horrible way to feel better. But there are two parts of your brain - one that really wants to destroy the other. & sometimes the idea of self-destruction is very romantic. I got over that.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

I think people are always nostalgic for a time about 20 years before they were born.

The whole romanticized 'sad clown' thing, we gotta get rid of that. That has to go! That's just getting sick people to voluntarily stay sicker and sadder than they have to be.

I spent a lot of my twenties wanting a maid, really. I thought I wanted a relationship, but I just wanted somebody to fix and nurse me, and I'd take her hostage for six months. When you're 23, 24, you want to be in a relationship because they look brilliant - you've heard all the songs about it and seen all the movies and it looks great.

Be careful what you’re doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.