The Last Romantics Quotes

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.

And yet, And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we teach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“The greatest works of poetry are the stories we tell about ourselves.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Our mother taught us how to protect ourselves from hurt but not how to determine what might be worth the risk.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Better was largely irrelevant when it came to mothering because the entire enterprise relied on the presumption that one day, sooner than you thought, your child would become an entirely self-reliant, independent person who made her own decisions. That child wouldn't necessarily remember the Halloween costumes you made from hand six years running. Or maybe she did, but she resented you for it because she'd wanted store-bought costumes just like all her friends. It didn't matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child waled off in to the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Some people will choose, again and again, to destroy what it is they value most.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“The love of your life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“It’s possible to exist under any number of illusions, to believe so thoroughly in the presence of things you cannot see—safety, God, love—that you impose upon them physical shapes. A bed, a cross, a husband. But ideas willed into being are still ideas and just as fragile.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it. And yet. And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for? Acknowledgments This book was a long time coming.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naive believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“It was irrational, illogical, obsessive, unhealthy, and absolutely necessary.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Without Joe our atoms did not know where to rest, how to behave. We were free radicals, spinning in our own small orbits, dangerous, poisonous, causing invisible but elemental damage to anything we touched.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“On some questions the need for persuasion meant you had already lost.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“The love of our life is always the one you have betrayed the most. The love that defines you is the one upon whom you once turned your back.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“It took a madman to believe that individual involvement might change a system. It required a miracle, it required magic. Or maybe not. Maybe all it required was the alchemy of individuals who believe first that they can change themselves.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really, what else is there? Amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles, the magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Dad?' All at once I remembered that long-gone afternoon from the Pause when Joe took me to the yellow house and we stood in our parents' old bedroom and waited for our father. I had never told anyone about that day, and I did not tell Caroline now. The memory felt like a small, terrible bomb I was holding in my hands.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Back then, poets seemed quaint, possibly irrelevant, but there is something about crisis that returns us to the fundamentals to make sense of an uncertain future and remind us of what we need to know. It’s been that way since humans began telling stories. We sang our poems, we chanted them.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Back then he had seemed like all she was good for, all she deserved. Donny inhabited a dark place that was familiar to her, and she knew how familiarity could sometimes feel like comfort.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“Caroline. Listen to me. You have to decide what you love. Joe wasn't the only one. You have to decide now and hold on. Start small. Begin with the small things and work up from here.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“It didn’t matter how great a mother you tried to be; eventually every child walked off into the world alone.”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

“No”
― Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics