Jean-Pierre Dardenne Quotes

I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

To have felt too much is to end in feeling nothing.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

Sentimentality is the respect the cold-hearted pay to feeling.

...if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Reason must be the universal rule and guide; all things must be done according to reason without allowing oneself to be swayed by emotion.

I still care about people but it would be so much easier not to care. I don't want to get too close; I don't like to touch things.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

During the '60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me. I don't really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the '60s I never thought in terms of 'love' again.

I was an emotional manipulator of fighters . . . You have to know how to be cold, you know? Just have no -emotions, no feelings. It takes time, though, to develop that. I'd been working on that since I was 12 years old. It doesn't happen overnight.

Here pity only lives when it is dead - Virgil

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

Love is getting to be cynical, passion's just physical.

There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.

Breakup blackout is when you're so upset and you've been crying so much that you basically black out for a couple of days. You wake up to mascara caked on your face and empty ice cream cartons everywhere, and your iTunes has, like, four new really bad romantic comedies you've rented. And your friends are texting you, and for three days you're in this black hole.