Sentimentality Quotes

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.”
― Ariana Reines

“Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”
― Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts

“The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“We got passes, till midnight after the parade. I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, two drugstore tuna-fish sandwiches, then a movie she wanted to see, something with Greer Garson in it. I looked at her several times in the dark when Greer Garson’s son’s plane was missing in action. Her mouth was opened. Absorbed, worried. The identification with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy complete. I felt awe and happiness. How I love and need her undiscriminating heart. She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show to their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn’t use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“One of Sir Topher's rules was to never indulge in sentimentality, never return for what was left behind.”
― Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock

“No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!”
― Sheri S. Tepper

“For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside

“But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Fake Math owes its existence to a number of things and people who have inspired and assisted this book on its way into the world.”
― ryan fitzpatrick, Fake Math: poems

“Just as evil never dies, neither does the sentimental.”
― Yukio Mishima, Star

“He was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Hildegard had long felt that sentimentality was a luxury she could not afford.”
― Muriel Spark

“I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“One day I sold my table-glass, and then in the night thought better of it, so that in the morning I drove to Nairobi and asked the lady who had bought it to call off the deal. I had no place to put the glass, but the fingers and lips of many friends had touched it, they had given me excellent wine to drink out of it; it was keeping an echo of old table-talk, and I did not want to part with it. After all, I thought, it would be an easy thing to break.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

“Sentimentality often grew fangs and bit a person in the rump.”
― Kerri Maniscalco, Throne of the Fallen

“Every bookstore, everywhere, smelled the same.
It smelled like home.”
― Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do in the Dark

“The sound... pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber... All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon.

...And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration upon myself.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“I trust people to act according to their nature. Anything more is sentimentality.
– Dread Empress Malicia the First”
― ErraticErrata, The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized

“Since the success of the kailyard writers was comparatively short-lived, and their ambitions limited, it seems peculiar to non-Scottish readers that the persistence of the reaction to them was so intense that 'sentimentality' remains to this day a term of literary abuse to which no defence may be offered, and counter-kailyarders go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate from their work the least trace of theological light or metaphysical hope.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction

“I wonder why it's wrong to be sentimental. People are so contemptuous of feeling. 'You wouldn't catch me ME sitting alone and mooning,' they say. 'Moon' is what they say when they mean remember, and they are so proud of not remembering. It's strange, how they pride themselves upon their lacks. 'I never take anything seriously,' they say. 'I simply couldn't imagine,' they say, 'letting myself care so much that I could be hurt.' They say, 'No one person could me that important to ME.' And why, why do they think they're right?”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“،ذہن کو کچھ خاص یاد بھی نہیں

پر یادداشت کو یقین ہے

، کہ جو بیت چُکا ہمیشہ کے لِیے

وہی وقت سب سے حسین ہے۔

،موجودگی میں معمولی سا لگتا تھا

اب گُزر گیا تو شخصِیت عظیم ہے۔

، کوئ کمی بھی نہیں ہے ’آج‘ میں

یوں ہی بے وجہ دِل غمگین ہے۔

سمجھنے کی بات ہے زِندہ صِرف ’آج‘ ہے۔

بھلے زِندگی کل، آج، اور کل میں تقسیم ہے۔”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“Hey,' she says breathlessly. She has said hey to me like this every day since she got her schedule changed. I live for these heys.”
― Jenny Torres Sanchez, The Downside of Being Charlie

“The dinner was set in the house. Lee said, 'I'd have liked to serve it under the tree like the other times, but the air is chilly.'
'So it is, Lee,' said Samuel.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Sentimentality is like religion and it demands a spiritual sufferance. It comes from frightened people.”
― Scott Pearce, faded yellow by the winter

“. . . one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egoist, driven by grandiosity rather than green, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has. It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world populated by extreme and commanding figures.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours