No age seemed the age of romance to itself.
~ Thomas Carlyle - [Romance and Romanticism]

Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not.
~ Aleister Crowley - [Romance and Romanticism]

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
~ George William Curtis - [Romance and Romanticism]

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.
~ Isaac Disraeli - [Romance and Romanticism]

Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father's curse, mother's moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.
~ Emma Goldman - [Romance and Romanticism]

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!
~ Oliver Goldsmith - [Romance and Romanticism]

She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.
~ Oliver Goldsmith - [Romance and Romanticism]

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.
~ Beverly Jones - [Romance and Romanticism]

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
~ D. H. Lawrence - [Romance and Romanticism]

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.
~ Kate Millet - [Romance and Romanticism]