French Quotes | Quotes about French

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  • French Quote #1

    (...) il fallait séparer nos souffles, s'écarter, s'espacer, se lever, se dédoubler, et c'est toujours autant de perdu. Quand on a deux corps, il vient des moments où l'on est à moitié.
    - Est-ce que je suis envahissante?
    - Terriblement, lorsque tu n'es pas là.

    Romain Gary

  • French Quote #2

    (From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)

    At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...

    Pierre Boulez

  • French Quote #3

    Gay-Lussac was quick, lively, ingenious and profound, with great activity of mind and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of all the living chemists in France.

    Humphry Davy

  • French Quote #4

    Je suis désolé,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.

    Kate Atkinson

  • French Quote #5

    {...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.

    Andrea Bouchaud

  • French Quote #6

    – Tonton Gabriel, dit Zazie paisiblement, tu m'as pas encore espliqué si tu étais un hormosessuel ou pas, primo, et deuzio où t'avais été pêcher toutes les belles choses en langue forestière que tu dégoisais tout à l'heure? Réponds.
    – T'en as dla suite dans les idées pour une mouflette, observa Gabriel languissamment.

    Raymond Queneau

  • French Quote #7

    ¡A la mierda! ¡El que quiera leer a Rimbaud que aprenda francés!

    Budd Schulberg

  • French Quote #8

    A cheval sur une tombe et une naissance difficile. Du fond du trou, rêveusement, le fossoyeur applique ses fers. On a le temps de vieillir. L'air est plein de nos cris.

    Samuel Beckett

  • French Quote #9

    A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on.

    French proverb

  • French Quote #10

    A ses yeux, celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs de bonté était bon, celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs de loyauté était loyal. Celui qui donnait des signes extérieurs d'intelligence, intelligent. C'est ainsi qu'il n'avait jamais vu clair en sa fille, ni en sa femme, ni en sa seule et unique maîtresse – il était sans doute loin de voir clair en lui...

    Philip Roth

  • French Quote #11

    Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.

    Heather O'Neill

  • French Quote #12

    Adieu, mon cher vieux. Relis et rebûche ton conte. Laisse-le reposer et reprends-le, les livres ne se font pas comme les enfants, mais comme les pyramides, avec un dessin prémédité, et en apportant des grands blocs l´un par-dessus l´autre, à force de reins, de temps et de sueur, et ça ne sert à rien! et ça reste dans le désert! mais en le dominant prodigieusement. Les chacals pissent au bas et les bourgeois montent dessus, etc.; continue la comparaison.

    Gustave Flaubert

  • French Quote #13

    All changes, even the most longed for, must have their melancholy

    Anatole France

  • French Quote #14

    Allez, philosophes, enseignez, éclairez, allumez, pensez haut, parlez haut, courez joyeux au grand soleil, fraternisez avec les places publiques, annoncez les bonnes nouvelles, prodiguez les alphabets, proclamez les droits, chantez les Marseillaises, semez les enthousiasmes, arrachez des branches vertes aux chênes. Faites de l'idée un tourbillon. Cette foule peut être sublimée. Sachons nous servir de ce vaste embrasement des principes et des vertus qui pétille, éclate et frissonne à de certaines heures. Ces pieds nus, ces bras nus, ces haillons, ces ignorances, ces abjections, ces ténèbres, peuvent être employés à la conquête de l'idéal. Regardez à travers le peuple et vous apercevrez la vérité. Ce vil sable que vous foulez aux pieds, qu'on le jette dans la fournaise, qu'il y fonde et qu'il y bouillonne, il deviendra cristal splendide, et c'est grâce à lui que Galilée et Newton découvriront les astres.

    Victor Hugo

  • French Quote #15

    Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it.

    Nigel Slater

  • French Quote #16

    Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors.

    In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

    Jeffrey H. Jackson

  • French Quote #17

    ALPHA-60: Your name is written Ivan Johnson, but it is pronounced Lemmy Caution, Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville.

    CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call normal.

    ...

    ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked.

    CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal.

    JeanLuc Godard

  • French Quote #18

    An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - Why are you sad?
    I'm not sad, I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.
    You should not be sad, he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later. The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. It is criminal, the love, he said, patting my shoulder. But none is worse.

    Margaret Atwood

  • French Quote #19

    Annoyance has made me bilingual.

    Gayle Forman

  • French Quote #20

    As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
    One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep.

    Giles MacDonogh

  • French Quote #21

    Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were “stressed out”.

    David Sedaris

  • French Quote #22

    because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a
    friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive
    politeness.

    Marcel Proust

  • French Quote #23

    Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.

    Bob Dylan

  • French Quote #24

    Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.

    Alan Powers

  • French Quote #25

    Bonne nuit, ma reine; soyez sage.

    Kate Chopin

  • French Quote #26

    But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

    Marcel Proust

  • French Quote #27

    But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

    Don DeLillo

  • French Quote #28

    C'est cela l'amour, tout donner, tout sacrifier sans espoir de retour.

    Albert Camus

  • French Quote #29

    C'est pas assez que tous tu dis c'est de la merde, François? Tu veux coucher dans la merde, aussi?

    Jennifer Donnelly

  • French Quote #30

    C’est un plaisir que de supputer, subodorer, côtoyer le mystère qui se tramait dans les quartiers, villages et ruelles de Montréal, et de se demander comment tout ça allait finir. J’avais confiance. J’avais confiance en l’humanité entière qui arrivait à Montréal, en l’humanité qui unissait Montréal aux autres villes du monde, celles qui fascinent par leur site, comme Istanbul, celles qui fascinent par leur prestige, comme Paris, par leur taille, comme New York, par leur élan, comme Shanghai, par leur lourdeur, comme Moscou. Montréal fascine par son mystère, rien de plus, mais rien de moins, me disais-je.

    Monique LaRue

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