I fear death. I think I must learn to romanticize death so that I can cope with its brutal irreversible numbness...!

I romanticized him until he was the perfect being. A soul so beautiful, but so immensely evil too.

The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.

We have scholars galore, and kings and emperors, and statesmen and military leaders, and artists in profusion, and inventors, discoverers, explorers - but where are the great lovers? After a moment's reflection one is back to Abelard and Heloise, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or the story of the Taj Mahal. So much of it is fictive, expanded and glorified by the poverty-stricken lovers whose prayers are answered only by myth and legend.

Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.