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“Like the magnolia tree,
She bends with the wind,
Trials and tribulation may weather her,
Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms,
See her standing there, like steel,
With her roots forever buried,
Deep in her Southern soil.”
― Nancy B. Brewer, Letters from Lizzie

“For gypsies do not like to stay -
They only come to go away.”
― Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline and the Gypsies

“If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“Người Việt Nam đ�� ra là t�� động biết s�� ma, s�� mơ thấy lửa, s�� gò má cao, s�� nốt ruồi �� tuyến l��, s�� ăn thịt chó đầu tháng, s�� ăn thịt vịt đầu năm, s�� hương không uốn, s�� pháo không n��, s�� năm hạn, s�� tuổi xung, s�� sao Thái Bạch, vân vân và vân vân.

Người Pháp không s�� vu vơ như vậy. Người Pháp gọi đó là mê tín d�� đoan. Nhưng người Pháp học cấp một đã s�� dụng trôi chảy các thuật ng��: thất nghiệp, tr�� cấp xã hội, lương tối thiểu, tiền thuê nhà, tiền tr�� góp, tiền bảo hiểm ô tô, hợp đồng làm việc ngắn hạn, dài hạn, thời gian th�� thách, thu�� thu nhập, thu�� th�� trạch, thu�� ng�� cư, thu�� vô tuyến truyền hình, thu�� giá tr�� gia tăng...Người nước ngoài �� Pháp còn s�� dụng trôi chảy thêm một s�� thuật ng�� khác: th�� cư trú tạm thời, th�� cư trú vĩnh viễn, th�� lao động, h�� sơ t�� nạn, h�� sơ quốc tịch, h�� sơ đoàn t�� gia đình, h�� sơ xin tr�� cấp...”
― �ճ��ận, Paris 11 tháng 8

“For example, in Paris, if one desires to buy something, you enter the store and say "Good morning, sir" or "madam," depending on what is appropriate, you wait until you are greeted, you make polite chitchat about the weather or some such, and when the salesperson asks what they can do for you, then and only then do you bring up the vulgar business of the transaction you require.”
― Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River

“He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness

“Eiffel Tower"
To Robert Delaunay

Eiffel Tower
Guitar of the sky

Your wireless telegraphy
Attracts words
As a rosebush the bees

During the night
The Seine no longer flows

Telescope or bugle

EIFFEL TOWER

And it's a hive of words
Or an inkwell of honey

At the bottom of dawn
A spider with barbed-wire legs
Was making its web of clouds

My little boy
To climb the Eiffel Tower
You climb on a song

Do
re
mi
fa
sol
la
ti
do

We are up on top

A bird sings
in the telegraph
antennae

It's the wind
Of Europe
The electric wind

Over there

The hats fly away
They have wings but they don't sing

Jacqueline
Daughter of France
What do you see up there

The Seine is asleep
Under the shadow of its bridges

I see the Earth turning
And I blow my bugle
Toward all the seas

On the path
Of your perfume
All the bees and the words go their way

On the four horizons
Who has not heard this song

I AM THE QUEEN OF THE DAWN OF THE POLES
I AM THE COMPASS THE ROSE OF THE WINDS THAT FADES
EVERY FALL
AND ALL FULL OF SNOW
I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE
IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONG

That's the way the Tower spoke to me one day

Eiffel Tower
Aviary of the world
Sing Sing
Chimes of Paris

The giant hanging in the midst of the void
Is the poster of France

The day of Victory
You will tell it to the stars”
― Vicente Huidobro, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

“The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit.”
― J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

“My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. I t was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.
Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern I talian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.
Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“Near the kiosk the old lady who sold refreshments seemed slowly to be gathering all the shadows of evening about her skirts.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.”
― Nancy B. Brewer, Letters from Lizzie

“France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine.”
― William Arthur Sirmon, That's War

“Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.”
― Kimberly Cutter, The Maid

“The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“Above Constance's desk were nude photographs of women in 1930s France, draped in provocative poses. She had put them there for Bob's viewing pleasure and in return he had placed African art of naked men above his desk for her.”
― Cecelia Ahern, One Hundred Names

“He mused on this village of his, which had sprung up in this place, amid the stones, like the gnarled undergrowth of the valley. All Artaud's inhabitants were inter-related, all bearing the same surname to such an extent that they used double-barrelled names from the cradle up, to distinguish one from another. At some antecedent date an ancestral Artaud had come like an outcast, to establish himself in this waste land. His family had grown with the savage vitality of the vegetation, drawing nourishment from this stone till it had become a tribe, then the tribe turned to a community, till they could not sort out their cousinage, going back for generations. They inter-married with unblushing promiscuity.”
― Émile Zola, La Faute de l'abbé Mouret

“New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid.

Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples.

Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something.

Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking."

Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?”
― Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass

“Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“It is at a time like this, when crisis threatens the stomach, that the French display the most sympathetic side of their nature. Tell them stories of physical injury or financial ruin and they will either laugh or commiserate politely. But tell them you are facing gastronomic hardship, and they will move heaven and earth and even restaurant tables to help you.”
― Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence

“They stamped their own pattern of lovers onto the fabric of Paris.”
― Emma Calin, Knockout!

“Majestatis naturæ by ingenium (Genius equal to the majesty of nature.)

[Inscribed ordered by King Louis XV for the base of a statue of Buffon placed at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris.]”
― Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon

“Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.”
― Nick Yapp, The Xenophobe's Guide to the French

“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

“The wind blowing through the cracks in the walls was fitting for this isolated and lonely place.”
― Nancy B. Brewer, Garnet

“As my body recalled my soul, I began to quiver with pain and gasp for air.”
― Nancy B. Brewer, Garnet

“{...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.”
― Andrea Bouchaud, Twenty in Paris: A Young American Perspective of Studying Abroad in Paris

“...the weather was atrocious. A frightful storm burst upon us. We camped literally in water...To cap our woe, there was no means to light a single fire. We had to imagine dinner.”
― Leonce Patry, The Reality of War: A Memoir of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-1871

“I think France reminds me of Missouri. I grew up there so i should know, but it does not remind me of Paris. NO,no,no. It reminds me of the country part that I adore. I know most people dont like the smell of cow poop, but if you grew up there and you get use to it, it is the most amazing smell that one can wake up to!! Plus the country part of France can be relaxing.... sometimes.:)”
― Stevie Rae Cole