Sentimentality Quotes - Page 4

• We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?

  Jack Kornfield

  Buddhism, Suffering, Doe

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• What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Sad Love, Believe, Bad Relationship

  Margaret Mitchell (2016). “Gone with the Wind”, p.675, Hamilton Books

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• Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

  Margaret Atwood

  Beautiful, Flower, Heart

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more. Like icy adolescents, such poetry is more interested in commiserating than acknowledging that feelings — the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality — actually exist.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Lonely, Smart, Emotional

  "Wipe That Smirk Off Your Poem". www.nytimes.com. March 16, 2015.

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• I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them--unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality.

  Matthew Scully

  Eye, Sight, Names

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• I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Wall, Ideas, Decision

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “A Bend in the River”, p.94, Pan Macmillan

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• Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain...Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Pain, Simple, Men

  Karen Marie Moning (2011). “Shadowfever: Fever Series”, p.288, Delacorte Press

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• ...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Falling In Love, Color, Mind

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• To the modern spirit, disillusioned, or at least unillusioned, the great evil to be avoided is sentimentality.

  Irwin Edman

  Evil, Spirit, Modern

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• By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Country, Victory, Towns

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• The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Sex, Two, Fiction

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• My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

  David Foster Wallace

  Strong, Fighting, Past

  "David Foster Wallace" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. September 29, 2008.

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• Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Strong, Stars

  Maya Angelou (2013). “Mom & Me & Mom”, p.10, Random House

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• The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

  Walker Percy

  Loss, Identity, Age

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.165, Open Road Media

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• If spirituality is not religion or cynicism or sentimentality or narcissism, then what is it?... we can confidently say... that spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.

  Elizabeth Lesser

  Earth, Way, Spirituality

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• Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

  Mal Peet

  Cousin, Believe, Kissing

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• Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.

  Cecil Beaton

  Intelligent, Conceit, Enthusiastic

  Cecil Beaton (1957). “The Face of the World: An International Scrapbook of People and Places”

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• Sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Semantics

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• There is no true joy and compassion except through the difficult emotions - all we get without the experience of fear, anger, and sadness are cheap imitations of joy and compassion - pleasantness and sentimentality.

  Gabrielle Roth

  Sadness, Compassion, True Joy

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• The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

  Teju Cole

  Evil, World, Enthusiasm

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• ...we sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species - preference for man simply because we are men - is not sentiment, then what is?

  C. S. Lewis

  Loyalty, Sacrifice, Men

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• Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.

  Robert Barron

  Love Is, Cold, Without Love

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• The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.

  Jon Landau

  Rocks, Depth, Rolling

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• From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.

  Andrew Davies

  Drama, Moving, Thinking

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• Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Bird, Fool, Easy

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Despair”, p.104, Penguin UK

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