Mary Wesley Quotes

Sometimes we fall in love with the idea of a person and have trouble seeing the real thing.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.

There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.

I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life.

I probably revisit in my work the moment at which I realised that dreams couldn't be reality.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

I don't think you should meet the people you most admire. I don't want reality to interfere with my image.

Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.

You'd rather make up a fantasy version of somebody in your head than be with a real person.

The fundamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

Young people are fascinated with the idea of love, maybe because they haven't experienced it. The older you get, the more jaded you become with this, like, mystical love thing. It's not as exciting because it's not unknown.

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

Love is a deception and a trap. Love is as big a myth that God sits with his flowing white beard in a throne and looks at us.

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.

When you fall head over heels for someone, you're not falling in love with who they are as a person; you're falling in love with your idea of love.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

The only true love is love at first sight; second sight dispels it.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.