No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.
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PrefaceNathaniel Hawthorne
» Nathaniel Hawthorne - all quotes »
...There’s a romance to danger. There’s a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the STORY of our lives better.
Joey Comeau
Outside of God's perspective, even romance loses its significance. Not in riches or in romance do we find fulfillment, but in God.
Don Miller
Melville was a born romancer. One cannot account for the success of his early romances by saying that in the Great South Sea he had found and worked a new field for romance, since evidently it was not his experience in the South Sea that had led him to romance, but the irresistible attraction that romance had over him that led him to the South Sea. He was able not only to feel but to interpret that charm, as it never had been interpreted before, as it never has been interpreted since.
Herman Melville
Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.
John Buchan
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.
Tom Robbins
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hay, John
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