QuoteProject
I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.
Anais Nin
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the lasting impact of idealized love over physical relationships.

Anais Nin explores the theme of romanticism versus realism in relationships, suggesting that while men may move on from physical and superficial connections, they often retain a profound admiration for the unattainable ideal. This idealization of past loves emphasizes the power of longing and the emotional resonance of that first, often impossible, love that stays with someone far longer than fleeting romantic encounters.

Themes

RomanticismLoveIdealizationRelationshipsMemory

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a wedding speech to highlight the timeless nature of true love.

More from Anais Nin

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
Anais NinRead
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
Anais NinRead
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
Anais NinRead
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
Anais NinRead
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
Anais NinRead

Similar quotes

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.
Khaled HosseiniRead
It is too early to love. We will buy the right to do so by shedding blood.
Jean-Paul SartreRead
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
George Bernard ShawRead
Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.
Charles BaudelaireRead
The best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent Van GoghRead
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.
Robert A. HeinleinRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.