“How do you know I'm a romanticist?" Like most romanticists Anwar too prided himself on being a realist.”

“You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?”

“…like the horse in the old ballads, which Romanticism found in the medieval castle and left in the streets of our own century. The Romanticists rode the poor best until he was so nearly dead that he finally lay down in the gutter, where the realists found him, his flesh eaten away by sores and worms, and, out of pity, carried him away to their books.”

“We're [Luxenbenites] not talking about the emotional drivel your romanticists have fantasized. We're talking about nature's actual laws. The hard and fast rules every species has to observe. The ones you've so scrupulously ignored.”

“I'm no optimist. I'm just a realist who smiles too much.”

“Being realistic is the most common path to mediocrity.”