The soul's a sort of sentimental wife, That prays and whimpers of the higher life.
One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll.
If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
My wife is really sentimental. One Valentine's Day I gave her a ring and to this day she has never forgotten those three little words that were engraved inside Made in Taiwan!
I am not a sentimental person.
Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.
I'm not terribly sentimental.
Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.
The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
"Sentimentalist" is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse that to be cruel, which it isn't.
I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense. . . I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover; and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.
Party action should follow, not precede the creation of a dominant popular sentiment.
Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.
Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain.
All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.
I mean, I think I'm pretty sentimental.
To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.