Top 60 Roman Payne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.”

— Roman Payne

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, Identity Quotes, Aesthetic Quotes, Freedom Quotes, Adventure Quotes

2. “In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.”

— Roman Payne

3. “Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.”

— Roman Payne

4. “She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belongs to no man and to no city. She knows nothing of borders and invents her own rules and customs. ‘Time’ for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”

— Roman Payne

5. “Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.”

— Roman Payne

Featured in: Romance Quotes

6. “All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”

— Roman Payne

7. “As for you girls, you must risk everything for Freedom, and give everything for Passion, loving everything that your hearts and your bodies love. The only thing higher for a girl and more sacred for a young woman than her freedom and her passion should be her desire to make her life into poetry, surrendering everything she has to create a life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in her imagination.”

— Roman Payne

8. “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.”

— Roman Payne

9. “Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.”

— Roman Payne

10. “All that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.”

— Roman Payne

11. “To wander is to be alive.”

— Roman Payne

12. “We were hooked when we woke. We had arms for each other. But I yearned to resume My dreams of another.”

— Roman Payne

13. “It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!”

— Roman Payne

14. “Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.”

— Roman Payne

15. “I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.”

— Roman Payne

16. “Wandering is the activity of the child, the passion of the genius; it is the discovery of the self, the discovery of the outside world, and the learning of how the self is both “at one with” and “separate from” the outside world. These discoveries are as fundamental to the soul as “learning to survive” is fundamental to the body. These discoveries are essential to realizing what it means to be human. To wander is to be alive.”

— Roman Payne

17. “Analogies are like lies.”

— Roman Payne

18. “She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the afternoon hour, beneath that fragrant linden bower, I had to chase all of the leafs that fell away.”

— Roman Payne

19. “Favoring ‘resolution’ the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.”

— Roman Payne

20. “I met Anne in the autumn... Autumn, that wild season when rural men rack orchard trees with sticks and weep with the desire to kiss faraway Demeter’s supple breasts – to set lips to her travel-swollen eyes. They seek goddesses, but I desired only Anne.”

— Roman Payne

21. “You are like a god, like an immortal one,′ she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. ‘Oh, my love,’ I whispered back to her, ‘I am more mortal than all. It seems that a part of me dies every night that I lie with you.”

— Roman Payne

22. “Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: mystery, fate, enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we’re not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world they preside over.”

— Roman Payne

23. “Our eyes will know the heavens if our lips stay for each other.”

— Roman Payne

24. “With her enchanting songs, her rare beauty, and clever tricks, this wild ‘wanderess’ ensnared my soul like a gypsy-thief, and led me foolish and blind to where you find me now. The first time I saw her, fires were alight. It was a spicy night in Barcelona. The air was fragrant and free.”

— Roman Payne

25. “A ‘dreamer’ is one possesses the gift of dreaming by day. Sure, many dream at night, but don’t also small babies and animals dream at night? To dream by day and dream aloud: Is this not the reward for all the troubles we humans must face?”

— Roman Payne

26. “If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.”

— Roman Payne

27. “Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?”

— Roman Payne

28. “I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth.”

— Roman Payne

29. “What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.”

— Roman Payne

30. “Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.”

— Roman Payne

31. “They say Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.”

— Roman Payne

32. “The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.”

— Roman Payne

33. “When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.”

— Roman Payne

34. “All that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria. And so, I make love and I write.”

— Roman Payne

35. “I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.”

— Roman Payne

36. “Yes, in a woman, looks are the most important thing... But it’s not how she looks ‘to’ us, so much as ‘how she looks at’ us.”

— Roman Payne

37. “She called herself an angel, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She lived every kind of life and dreamt every kind of dream. She was wild in her wandering, a drop of free water. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself an angel, and her god was Beauty.”

— Roman Payne

38. “I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a ‘wanderess.’ Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences – whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.”

— Roman Payne

39. “He was no god, just an artist; and when an artist is a man, he needs a woman to create like a god.”

— Roman Payne

40. “May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.”

— Roman Payne

41. “Visions from the gods are gifts alone for those who wander.”

— Roman Payne

42. “From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.”

— Roman Payne

43. “She called herself Europa, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself Europa, and her god was Beauty.”

— Roman Payne

44. “The Love of Europa: She called herself Europa. She was wild in her wandering, a drop of free water. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself Europa, and her god was Beauty.”

— Roman Payne

45. “Even the memory of cradling her in my arms is pure euphoria. And all that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.”

— Roman Payne

46. “I regained my soul through literature after those times I’d lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.”

— Roman Payne

Featured in: Reading Quotes

47. “After 15 years living in Paris, I felt myself growing old and stagnant – similar to stagnant water sitting in a bowl; cats have a survival instinct not to drink this water. They can sense when it’s old and may be carrying air-borne germs. After 15 years in Paris, I no longer felt drinkable.”

— Roman Payne

48. “The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.”

— Roman Payne

49. “I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.”

— Roman Payne

50. “Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.”

— Roman Payne