“I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.”

“I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.”

“But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.”

“What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country”

“I await the revises, and promise you not to 'make my quietus with a bare bodkin' till I have returned them. After that, I think of retiring. But first I would like to dine with you here. To leave life as one leaves a feast is not merely philosophy but romance.”

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”