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Love & Passion Quote by Cyrano de Bergerac

"A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving"

About this Quote

A kiss, in Cyrano's line, isn’t the grand declaration of love; it’s the flourish that proves the declaration has been written at all. The image is mischievously small: just a dot, a dab of color, something technically unnecessary to the word’s bulk yet essential to its legibility. That’s the wit. Love can be drafted in speeches, vows, and brave suffering, but without the intimate punctuation, it risks remaining abstract - admirable on paper, untested in the body.

The “rosy” detail matters: it pulls the metaphor out of the study and back into blood and breath. Cyrano isn’t romanticizing purity; he’s romanticizing precision. A kiss is not an accident or a crude grab for passion, but a deliberate mark that completes meaning. The line flatters physical affection by framing it as literacy, as if desire is a form of writing and the kiss is where handwriting becomes signature.

Context sharpens the subtext. Cyrano de Bergerac, immortalized in the later play by Rostand, is the patron saint of eloquence trapped behind self-doubt: the man who can compose love perfectly, but fears presenting himself as the author. That makes the kiss’s “dot” feel pointedly cruel and tender at once. If loving is a sentence, Cyrano can draft the whole paragraph; what torments him is the tiny, embodied gesture he believes he’s unworthy to deliver. The joke lands because it’s true: intimacy often hinges less on big feelings than on whether we dare to place the final mark.

Quote Details

TopicRomantic
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Bergerac, Cyrano de. (2026, January 15). A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-kiss-is-a-rosy-dot-over-the-i-of-loving-137324/

Chicago Style
Bergerac, Cyrano de. "A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-kiss-is-a-rosy-dot-over-the-i-of-loving-137324/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-kiss-is-a-rosy-dot-over-the-i-of-loving-137324/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

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A Kiss is a Rosy Dot Over the I of Loving - Cyrano de Bergerac
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About the Author

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Cyrano de Bergerac (March 6, 1619 - July 28, 1655) was a Playwright from France.

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