Always write kindly of my adopted country. Roumania needs friends. Come here often and try to understand it.
    Queen Marie of Romania

This is a small country, a new country, but it is a country I love. I want others to love it also; therefore listen to a few words about it. Let me paint a few pictures, draw a few sketches as I have seen them, first with my eyes, then with my heart.
    Queen Marie of Romania

There is an untranslatable Romanian word that expresses with great precision the kind of unbearable longing and nostalgia that grips one's heart when thinking of home. That word is dor. I have felt it many times. Nostalgia for the medieval squares of Sibiu steeped in golden light, longing for the outdoor cafes of Bucharest, drinking new wine, all of us young, intoxicated with poetry and song. I missed the smells of flowering linden trees, the blue reflections of deep mountain snow in the evenings, the old peasant villages that Ceauşescu's insanity almost wiped off the face of the earth. I missed the real fairy tales I was raised on. The story of the waters of life and death, youth without age, the tale of the sheep Mioriţa that recites the cosmic poetry of the sky, the story of the poplars that grew pears...
    Andrei Codrescu The Hole in the Flag, 1991

All of us in that cell had an unreal life story, so different from the average man. We had faith in our existence; we loved our country and people and were determined to sacrifice the best in us. The years spent in jail were a signature of that love... Our fellow political prisoners represented the jewels in the crown of the Romanian soul.
    Dr. Constantin Diaconescu  My Second University,  Stanciu Stroia, M.D., 2005

We'll no longer be able to make our mamaliga, because we'll have to eat sliced bread wrapped in plastic with a food safety stamp on it!
    Elderly Romanian telling BBC correspondent Oana Lungescu anxieties about Romania's EU membership