The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

My soul will find yours.

Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Is not this the true romantic feeling-not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

It is not irregular hours or irregular diet that make the romantic life.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.