Quote of the Day (Moliere, With a Romantic Young Woman's Notion of Courting)

MAGDELON. “Father, my cousin here will tell you just as well as I that marriage must never come until after the other adventures. A lover, to be agreeable, must know how to utter fine sentiments, breathe from his heart things sweet, tender, and passionate; and his suit must follow the rules. First he must see, in church, or on a walk, or at some public ceremony, the person with whom he falls in love; or else be fatally taken to her house by a relative or friend, and leave there dreamy and melancholy. For a time he hides his passion from the beloved object, and meanwhile pays her several visits, in which some question of gallantry never fails to be brought up to exercise the wits of the company. Comes the day of the declaration, which should ordinarily be made in some garden walk, while the company has moved on a bit; and this declaration is followed by instant wrath, which shows in our blushes, and which, for a time, banishes the lover from our presence. Then he finds a way to appease us, to accustom us imperceptibly to his talk about his passion, and to draw from us that admission that pains us so. After that come the adventures, the rivals that cross an established inclination, the persecutions of fathers, the jealousies conceived over false appearances, the laments, the despairs, the abductions, and what follows. That is how things are done with elegance; and those are the rules that cannot be dispensed with in proper gallantry. But to come point-blank to the conjugal union, to make love only by making the marriage contract, and to take the romance precisely by the tail! I repeat, Father, nothing could be more mercantile than such a procedure; and just the picture it gives me makes me nauseated.”

GORGIBUS. “What the devil is this jargon I hear? That’s the grand style all right!”— French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Ridiculous Precieuses, in Tartuffe and Other Plays, translated by Donald Frame (1967)

TV Quote of the Day (Nikki Glaser, on the Location of Your Soulmate)

“Your soulmate, statistically, is in China. That’s where your soulmate is, and that’s where they’ll die. The closest you’ll get is maybe your soulmate touched your phone on an assembly line, but that’s the closest where your stars will ever cross. Maybe he stitched your mom’s blouse when he was in third grade.”—Stand-up comic Nikki Glaser, Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die,” original air date May 11, 2024, teleplay by Nikki Glaser, directed by Hamish Hamilton

The image accompanying this post, showing Nikki Glaser on “The Blocks” podcast, was taken Dec. 22, 2022, by Neal Brennan.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Cocoanuts,’ in Which Groucho Romances a Rich Woman Who’s Unexpectedly Unattainable)

Hammer [played by Groucho Marx]: [to Mrs. Emily Potter, after trying to put his arms around her, only to find she’s too tall for him.] “Can you come down a little bit? Just think, tonight, tonight when the moon is sneaking around the clouds, I'll be sneaking around you. I'll meet you tonight under the moon. Oh, I can see you now -- you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I'll know ya.”— The Cocoanuts (1929), based on the Broadway play by George S. Kaufman, adapted by Morrie Ryskind, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley

Quote of the Day (Cora Frazier, With a New Twist on an Old Romance)

“He was a knight in King George’s court. She was an orphan peasant who lived in an abandoned mill.

“In the early morning, when she went to leave, the door to the parapet was stuck, and he had to use a power drill to get it open.”—Cora Frazier, “New Harlequin Titles,” The New Yorker, Oct. 19, 2015

Quote of the Day (Chloe Schama, on When Writers Break Up)

“When two writers meet, and fall in love, and break up, and then begin to write, is this competition impossible to avoid? Even in nonfiction, truth one can butt up against truth two. I haven’t intentionally invented anything here, but if Sam swore that he’d sent those freshman-year notes to my campus mailbox rather than slipping them under my door as I remember, would I vehemently disagree? Did we really send letters to his parents’ house? (Or do I just read too many 19th-century novels and like the antique feel of a “poste restante”?) Would Sam even remember the overgrown plant, which has become for me a symbol of a love that no longer fit?

“More important, does it matter if our accounts diverge? Probably not, and not just because one is nominally fiction. Fiction or non — there’s no such thing as a single truth when you’re writing the story of a breakup.”— Chloe Schama, “First Person: Never Date a Writer. You’ll End Up As Material,” New York Magazine, December 11, 2014

Quote of the Day (Comic Ryan Reiss, on Why NY Is the True ‘City of Romance’)

“People say Paris is the city of romance, but I say it’s New York. You only pay $2,900 a month in rent once before you look at whoever you’re dating and say, ‘I love you—let’s move in together.’”—Stand-up comic Ryan Reiss quoted in “Joke of the Week,” TimeOut New York, Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 2014