Nora Ephron Quotes

Fantasy love is much better than reality love.

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.

I am a romantic person and maybe have this Hollywood perception of love... but then, it's never really like the movies.

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

Nobody ever loved anybody like everybody wants to be loved.

Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing because Journey's Steve Perry insists we should never do that.

I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.

It's a mature thing to understand that your pictures of a lifetime together with someone were... well, the reality is not what we're taught.

We have this idealized romanticism about how love might solve all of our problems, but then it doesn't.

The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.

I want to make sure that the first person you kiss loves you, okay?

When you're in love, you're asking someone else to fulfill all your unfulfilled needs, to make you whole, and to make you feel good about everything, and no one can do that.

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.

I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful.

But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.

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

It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream

At the end of their relationship she asked if they could still remain friends. His face stayed expressionless until he said "No. Because we put friends in boxes. You see them once in a while, or even a lot, but still they have their box in your life, their specific place. Their *category.* That's one of the great things about being someone's love-- you have no box in their life because you're part of all their boxes. You're their friend, their lover, their confidante-- all those things. I don't want to be put in one of your boxes and I don't want to shrink you to fit into one of mine.

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.

I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented... The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.... To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.

Guys think of love as a feeling, which means that if you do something wrong you can still love somebody. So guys are constantly screwing up and then saying, "But I love you!" And girls have a different standard for love.