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

“Sometimes the objects we hold dear give away who we are even more than the people we love.”
― Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

“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

“I will say a few words about the connection of love and intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a sentamentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual, and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

“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

“Getting sentimental," you say, but who are you fooling, you've always been.”
― Stewart O'Nan, A Prayer for the Dying

“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

“The true poet is of the hero type, soaring above sensual gratification and rational formulas. The language of poetry has the potential for generating cosmic visions and the optimism of a regenerative belief system.”
― Fred Kaplan

“Never underestimate the corrective lens that is sentimentality.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“The heart is a muscle that pumps blood, not sentimentality!”
― Hugo Pratt, Corto Maltese: La ballade de la mer salée

“The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. And finally, it is the game's presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me...”
― Drew Rogers, Before the Spotlight

“This aspect of sentimentality also has its cultural forms. The Croatian sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic has described the postmodern condition as 'postemotional.' Drawing on the works of David Riesman, Emile Durkheim, George Ritzer, George Orwell, and others, he contends that emotions are the primary object of manipulation in postmodern culture. Emotion has increasingly been divorced from the intellect and judgement, and thus from responsible action: 'postemotional types,' as he puts it, 'know that they can experience the full range of emotions in any field, domestic or international, and never be called upon to demonstrate the authenticity of their emotions in commitment to appropriate action...Today, everyone knows that emotions carry no burden, no responsibility to act, and above all, that emotions of any sort are accessible to nearly everyone.”
― Jeremy S. Begbie, A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts

“Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. ...if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“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

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