Romanticizing Quotes

...we should distinguish carefully between women's and feminist institutions, remain aware of the costs of racial exclusiveness, and avoid romanticizing the past. ~ Estelle B. Freedman

I don't know if I am romanticizing, mythologizing, or being nostalgic. I assume all three. That seems to be how the brain breaks things down after a certain age. I ~ Marc Maron

Humanity had chosen the land over the sea millennia ago, and sometimes - when she let her mind wander, when she was romanticizing what she did and how she did it - she thought the sea still held a grudge. Breakups were never easy, and while humanity was hot and fast and had had plenty of time to get over it, the oceans were deep and slow, and for them all change had happened only yesterday. The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home. ~ Mira Grant

I'm not a good guy, Jacey. I'm not the person that you'd like to believe. Please know that. Don't make the mistake of romanticizing me. ~ Courtney Cole

I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if  Jesus said "I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of  God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that's who we are. We mistake the openness of our being - the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment - for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer. ~ Pema Chodron

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does. ~ Anne Roiphe

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future. ~ Paul Kingsnorth

America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive. ~ Ellen Glasgow

If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The root of all fears. Not being accepted by those we care about. Being rejected and isolated. It's a primal fear. As a species, we are meant to be part of a group. A community. We mistrust loners because we don't understand them. With the exception of our romanticizing the loner in movies and novels, of course. ~ Susan Mallery

The boy's mother said he was autistic and sometimes spaced out, staring at his hands, but because I didn't know what autism was, really, I figured he was more or less mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation because the kid was probably distracting himself or daydreaming or something, but I thought maybe he was like Hamlet looking at his hands, thinking sincerely about what it means to have been born. ~ Donald Miller

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying. ~ Jaron Lanier

At the Hospital, everyone thinks about dying.And I'd never been much for romanticizing death-especially not suicide. I'd always been a fan of staying alive.
After all, you basically do all you can not to die. All the time. The search for immortality isn't just from storybooks. every day you do it. You buckle your seat-belt, you take vitamin supplements, look both was before you cross the street. And you really think your doing all you can. Bullshit. We can lift weights for fucking hours and we're still going to die. ~ Hannah Moskowitz

According to Felicitas Goodman, the hunter-gatherers arrived on the scene no earlier than 200,000 years ago. She explains:
In a very real way, the hunters and gatherers open the first chapter of our human history. And fittingly, this dawning was as close to paradise as humans have ever been able to achieve. The men did the hunting and scavenging, working for about three hours a week, and the women took care of daily sustenance by gathering vegetal food and small animals. It was such a harmonious existence, such a successful adaptation, that it did not materially alter for many thousands of years. This view is not romanticizing matters. Those hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into the present still pursue the same lifestyle, and we are quite familiar with it from contemporary anthropological observation. Despite the unavoidable privations of human existence, despite occasional hunger, illness and other trials, what makes their life way so enviable is the fact that knowing every nook and cranny of their home territory and all that grows and lives in it, the bands make their regular rounds and take only what they need. By modern calculations, that amounted to only about 10 percent of the yield, easily recoverable under undisturbed conditions. They live a life of total balance, because they do not aspire to control their habitat; they are a part of it. ~ Nicholas E. Brink

I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine. ~ Tana French

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

The thing about dead people ... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is ... complicated, I guess. ~ John Green

I romanticized him until he was the perfect being. A soul so beautiful, but so immensely evil too. ~ Dominic Riccitello

There had been plenty of books and films romanticizing vampires over the last century. It was only a matter of time before a vampire started romanticizing himself. ~ Holly Black

Is it just that everything came too easy? Because if you're romanticizing 'difficult'...you're going to get over that quickly, I promise you. I promise you. Everyone forgets how difficult 'difficult' really is. ~ B.J. Novak

It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him; for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be. ~ Donna Tartt

I'd expected," Martha continued, "to have to deal with hysterics-bouts of weeping and pleading at the very least."
"Yes,well..." Heather pulled an expressive face. Looking ahead, she went on, "I have to admit I did feel like panicking at first, but...I've been wondering if I shouldn't view this as an adventure." She had to deflect any suspicion, so offered the one explanation that might serve. She gestured dramatically. "A romantical adventure, complete with mysterious villain, who might or might not prove to be devastatingly handsome."
Martha snorted. "So that's the way it is-you're romanticizing this blackguard who's arranged your kidnapping."
"Do you actually know if he's a blackguard?" Heather didn't have to manufacture her concern.
Martha grimaced. "I can't rightly say. I haven't had anything to do with the beggar. Fletcher and Cobbins were the ones that met him. But," she continued, "any blighter who arranges a kidnapping, and one as coolly planned as this, take it from me, handsome or not, you won't want to meet him." Martha glanced at her again. "Sure you won't want to rethink those hysterics?"
Heather arched her brows. "Will they get me any further?"
"Not with me-and Fletcher's more like to slap you than come over all solicitous."
"Well,then." Heather tipped up her face. "I believe I'll just go on romanticizing, at least until I have cause not to. You should be grateful-I'm making your task much easier. ~ Stephanie Laurens

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

I'm not a fan of people romanticizing their loved ones in death. ~ Taya Kyle

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.' ~ John Green

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode. ~ Dani Shapiro

I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn't choose. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful - the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.

Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access. ~ Jaron Lanier

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament. ~ Ian Frazier

The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. ~ Steven Pinker

'The Birth of a Nation' occupies a view of the South not far from Scarlett O'Hara's in 'Gone With the Wind,' and modern audiences have to wrestle with that beloved movie's romanticizing of racism. ~ Richard Corliss

I so don't want to be attracted to him, and the fact that I am surprises me. Sometimes when I get home, I convince myself that I'm just romanticizing anyone who's actually spoken to me, but then I see him the next day and my heart starts beating fast and I can't really kid myself. ~ Melina Marchetta

Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and the presumption of guessing at the inner thoughts of historical figures. Unfortunately, the result has largely been not to demythologize the past, but merely to dehumanize and depersonalize it. As Roger Mudd has pointed out, 'Too many of today's historians [and biographers] ... seem to have forgotten that the writing of history is a literary art. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

I was totally romanticizing the idea of Los Angeles when the Doors, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young were hanging out there. ~ Lykke Li