Quotes About Sentimentality

As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work.

There's a classic element that all good Disney movies have. It really comes down to the storytelling, I think. It manages to push all of these buttons inside of us; there's a sentimentality.

In reality, the apparent 'objectivity' of modern architecture is merely a mysticism in reverse, a congealed sentimentality disguised as objectivity; moreover one has seen often enough just how quickly this attitude is converted, in its protagonists, into the most changeable and arbitrary of subjectivisms.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

What George was thinking was that the late king Herod had been unjustly blamed for a policy which had been both statesmanlike and in the interests of the public. He was blaming the mawkish sentimentality of the modern legal system which ranks the evisceration and secret burial of small boys as a crime.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

Why did women think, Vic wondered, even women who had married for love and had had a child in a fairly happy married life, that they would prefer a man who demanded nothing of them sexually? It was a kind of sentimental harking back to virginity a silly, vain fantasy that had no factual validity whatsoever.

Romantico nel significato peggiore del termine, cioè contrassegnato da ideali melensi o insipidi che soltanto un'adolescente, o una società adolescente, potevano coltivare.

I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness.

He said a political writer must be careful. He quoted Auden: A writer's politics are more dangerous to him than his cupidity. He said, Political sentimentality is as bad as any other kind. You have to acknowledge ambiguity, complexity. There is a kind of death that creeps into your prose when you're trying to illustrate a principle, no matter how worthy.

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.

Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.

It seemed an odd thing to put on a tombstone, but then everything about the white man's burial customs seemed odd to Chee. The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses. Death robbed the body of its value.

Have you ever noticed there's no twilight in Africa? [...] It must affect the way the psyche develops. I think it makes people here stronger. No gentle twilight to ease them into the darkness. Maybe it's twilight that makes Westerners so sentimental. They can sit on their porches and watch day recede as night approaches. It gives them time to consider what they're going to lose. It's like dying slowly versus being shot.

Like many other sexually obsessed men he tended to be noncommittal, evasive, given to unexplained vanishings and sentimental utterances, but forever feverishly on the prowl.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

I can't think of another attitude to have toward an audience than a hopeful and positive one. And if that includes such unfashionable things as sentimentality, well, I can afford it.

I don't suppose you kept anything of hers, did you? Such as? A lock of hair, a knife which was dear to her, a scrap of her clothes? Vampires do not indulge in such foolishness, he said gruffly. They should, Evanna sighed.