the longing for depth collides with the fear of public embarrassment, producing a generation that craves tenderness but trains itself to appear nonchalant.

Romanticism makes us stubborn; it teaches us to linger, to preserve, an obstinacy that’s economically inconvenient.

the intensity of attention that notices the quiver of a wrist when reaching for a glass; the presence that enlarges an ordinary afternoon; the appetite that doesn’t require catastrophe to be vivid. I want Romanticism stripped of its operatic melodrama, no consumptive poets dying by candlelight, yet still devoted to grandeur: a sentence that... See more

whenever feeling grows too intense, state, church, or family rush in to discipline it, proof that Romanticism has always threatened any order built on obedience and efficiency.

We’ve traded the theatre of passion for the theatre of avoidance, as though emotional minimalism were the only responsible way to survive modern life.

To linger over a face, to let a single moment swell until it feels unmeasured, is a small act of disobedience in a culture that prizes momentum over meaning.