Love Quote by Ann Druyan

Druyan is pushing back on a stubborn cultural caricature: the scientist as gray, disenchanted, emotionally quarantined. Her move is simple but strategic. She doesn’t defend science on its usual turf (utility, progress, “facts”). She defends it as a source of romance, a word that reclaims wonder from the arts-and-humanities corner where it’s often parked. That’s the subtext: rational inquiry isn’t the enemy of enchantment; it’s a more disciplined way of earning it.

The sentence is built around a misperception she names bluntly: “People think…” That vague subject matters. She’s not debating a colleague; she’s addressing the ambient social weather that tells curious kids to choose between being “smart” and being alive. By stacking “joy,” “passion,” and “great romance of life,” she frames discovery as an emotional experience, not a sterile output. Then she flips the script with “completely opposite,” an emphatic reversal that reads like a corrective to an entire genre of smug cynicism.

Context sharpens the intent. Druyan’s career, intertwined with popular science storytelling (most famously in the orbit of Carl Sagan and Cosmos), has been about translating scientific thinking into felt experience without flattening it into self-help awe. Her claim argues for science as a humanist practice: not just knowing more, but feeling more accurately. The romance isn’t despite the rigor; it’s because the rigor makes the astonishment credible.