Unromantic Quotes

“Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud.”

— Marie Brennan

“Diseases of an unromantic sort,”

— Marie Brennan

“Honestly i don't understand the rousing of romance all that well. i used to believe in this thing called fate, or destiny. a romantic romeo and juliet, monet and veronica, etc. but now i feel jaded, maybe agnostic to the idea.
but choice used to seem so unromantic, as if some mystic force was not behind the meeting of 2 beautiful individuals. but now i think choice is the greater of the two simply for this fact: by choosing someone you are saying that out of all the people in the entire world i have decided that i want you apart of my life in perpetuum, for the rest of my life, and no one else.
no haphazard circumstance, no chance meetings where distant planets align. it's simply two rational individuals who make a choice and an effort to remain together.”

— Stephen Christian

“People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

“It is noteworthy that few works of fiction make marriage their central concern. As Northrup Frye puts it, with his accustomed clarity: 'The heroine who becomes a bride, and eventually, one assumes, a mother, on the last page of a romance, has accommodated herself to the cyclical movement: by her marriage ... she completes the cycle and passes out of the story. We are usually given to understand that a happy and well-adjusted sexual life does not concern us as readers.' Fiction has largely rejected marriage as a subject, except in those instances where it is presented as a history of betrayal
at worst an Updike hell, at best when Auden speaks of it as a game calling for 'patience, foresight, maneuver, like war, like marriage.' Marriage is very different than fiction presents it as being. We rarely examine its unromantic aspects.”

— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

“Men don't settle down because of the right woman. They settle down because they are finally ready for it. Whatever woman they're dating when they get ready is the one they settle down with, not necessarily the best one or the prettiest, just the one who happened to be on hand when the time got to be right. Unromantic, but still true.”

— Laurell K. Hamilton

“Who've you set up for me tonight?"
"Set up," Myra repeated, wrinkling her nose. "What an unromantic phrase."
"Sorry.How about-who are you planning to loose Cupid's arrow on?"
"It's still unromantic when you're smirking.”

— Nora Roberts

“Yes." She sighed again, with even more drama, not that Gregory would have imagined it possible. "It is
all so romantic," she added. "The bride, the groom ... "
"Both are considered standard in the ceremony, I understand."
His mother shot him a peevish look. "How could I have raised a son who is so unromantic?"
Gregory decided there could not possibly be an answer to that.”

— Julia Quinn

“That happy ending business - it's all a bit contrived. I don't ever believe it.
How unromantic. It wasn't true either. The truth was, Elle wanted to believe in happy ever after, more than anything. But to admit it would be to discount what she knew to be the real facts of life. So she didn't know how to admit that she longed, secretly, to have her perspective changed, by something or someone, she didn't know which.”

— Harriet Evans

“In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a cause for scorn. At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents.”

— Nick Hornby

“Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods
haloed most of them
but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“However romantically ill John might look, it seemed that he had nothing worse than an unromantic cold.”

— Barbara Pym

“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works - that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”

— Carl Sagan

“Yeah. Were you nervous?" "No." Aidan rolled his eyes. "That makes me feel better." "You want me to lie?" Mercy's black brows jumped, grin teasing at one corner of his mouth. Growing more serious: "There wasn't anything I wanted more in the world than Ava. Lots of shit makes me nervous, but not being married." "You enjoy it, don't you?" "What's that?" "Making the rest of us look like unromantic assholes." Mercy chuckled. "Yeah. I kinda do.”

— Lauren Gilley

“Behind a very sturdily built and staunchly defended facade of practical, unromantic hard-headedness towards life, there was just that little pool of softness that would never show if you poked for it, but could be reached if you knew just how-and never let on that you were looking for it.”

— Isaac Asimov

“I've never cheated on a lover. I'm faithful, always. But the war comes before anyone's feelings. Every time.
Wow. Battle before love. Without a doubt, he was the most unromantic male she'd ever met. Even more so than her great-grandfather, who had laughingly burned her great-grandmother to death after she'd given birth to Gwen's grandmother.”

— Gena Showalter

“Miss Darracott, an intelligent girl, now perceived that in harboring for as much as an instant the notion of marrying a man who fell so lamentably short of the ideal lover she was an irreclaimable ninnyhammer. Ideal lovers might differ in certain respects, but in whatever mold they were cast, not one of them was so unhandsome as to make it extremely difficult for one not to giggle at their utterances. This hopelessly overgrown and unromantic idiot must be given a firm set-down.”

— Georgette Heyer

“I'm the most unromantic lump of Northern suet. Yes, a woman did accost me once in South Shields, but she had a face like Red Rum.”

— Les Dawson

“But a sweater? I mean,that is so unromantic.It is the kind of thing I would get my dad - if he wasn't so in need of anger-management manuals,which is what I got for him for Christmas.”

— Meg Cabot

“Prenups are so unromantic - a sign of distrust, not love. Time for a reality check, my friends. First, drawing up a prenuptial agreement together is a sign of incredible trust and financial openness - you're fooling yourself if you think you can achieve complete intimacy without it.”

— Suze Orman

“You always hear actresses talk about how unromantic it is to act a love scene or a sex scene - which it is. You're doing it with all these lights on and cameras flying around and people on the set.”

— Sheryl Lee

“For all the ugly vices that capitalism encourages, it's at least interesting, exciting, it offers possiblities. In America, the struggle is at least an individual struggle. And if the individual has strength enough of character, salt enough of wit, the alternatives are thicker than polyesters in a car salesman's closet. In a socialistic system, you're no better or no worse than anybody else.'
But that's equality!'
Bullshit. Unromantic, unattractive bullshit. Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.”

— Tom Robbins

“I love not knowing what's going to happen next. With work, you never know. You rehearse and strive and get it right sometimes, and still you never know. Some people are like that with their marriages. They work and strive and labour and toil at them. God, what a bore! What an unromantic bore!”

— Celia Imrie

“You see, I am a very prosaic, unromantic, sensible sort of fellow myself; and I have always had my heart set on finding the most sensible, prudent, level-headed wife in the world. But, on the other hand, it is very important to me that she possess one very particular flaw: she must have no sense whatsoever where I myself am concerned. She would only have to take one look at me and - no matter what her steadiness of mind - she would lose it in the space of seconds ... Just lately, I have sometimes thought I may have found what I have always wanted. But just lately I have also noticed she has developed a most irritating habit of looking at the ground whenever we are together. Do you think she could try to overcome it? Well, Charlotte, are you going to look at me now?”

— Jane Austen

“Marriage Asian-style is practical, contractual and, to the western mind, deeply unromantic.”

— Jemima Khan

“For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.”

— Richard Russo

“I once offhandedly mentioned that I wanted to pick out my own ring, something I have to look at every day, but there is something decidedly unromantic and a little bit depressing about having a symbol of love reduced to such scientific classifications - especially classifications focusing on imperfections.”

— Emily Giffin

“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

— Oscar Wilde

“I'm afraid I don't have a very pragmatic or unromantic view of props. I don't imbue them with any great sense of mystery or anything.”

— Martin Freeman

“Better be unromantic than thoroughly used and still poor.”

— Sherry Thomas

“I don't believe I'd really want to be a sensible person, because they are so unromantic.”

— L.M. Montgomery

“It is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be in the position were thoroughly understood ... So we have tried to tell you the truth the uninteresting, unromantic truth.”

— Amy Carmichael

“Real history was unromantic, steeped in greed and blood and abject eye-rolling stupidity. An endless parade of putative Ozymandiases marching off to glory before snapping off at the ankles in the depths of the desert: that was human history. Every now and then there would be the pretence of civilisation, but soon enough the restless, hateful, atavistic hearts of humanity would tear down the towers and slide back into barbarism, squealing with glee. Decadence loves the taste of blood, even though it is poison.”

— Jonathan L. Howard

“I don't mind ... the fun and games of being treated like a fragile flower. But as a physiologist working with the unromantic scientific facts of life, I find it hard to delude myself about feminine frailty.”

— Estelle Ramey

“The real skill of being a writer is being able to take your inspired moments, and make them work as a whole, through the unromantic, daily hard work.”

— Nick Blaemire

“Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

“An unromantic poem I mean to make, of one who only lives for duty's sake.”

— Henrik Ibsen