Quotes by Authors - Page 14

Paris rubbed his forehead against his, running his hands through Roan‘s hair, and said, 'How about we come back here and exchange notes once we‘re done with the interviews? Take a long lunch.''Only exchange notes?''No one said we can‘t exchange notes in bed.
Andrea Speed
#Outlander QOTD Claire and Master Raymond.Snapped abruptly to a realization of how rudely I had been staring, I blushed and said without thinking, "I was just wondering if you've ever been kissed by a beautiful young girl?" I went still redder as he shouted with laughter. With a broad grin, he said "Many times, madonna. But alas, it does not help. As you see. Ribbit.
Diana Gabaldon
Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.
Ernest Hemingway
Snapped abruptly to a realization of how rudely I had been staring, I blushed and said without thinking, "I was just wondering if you've ever been kissed by a beautiful young girl?" I went still redder as he shouted with laughter. With a broad grin, he said "Many times, madonna. But alas, it does not help. As you see. Ribbit.
Diana Gabaldon
It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.
James Baldwin
At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air.
Anaïs Nin
All the buildings lining rue de Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek.
Eloisa James
... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...
Jean-Christophe Valtat
To know Paris, Bruno began, pulling on his cigarette, you need to relax, have a glass of wine, and enjoy life.
Jennifer Coburn
I am tired and drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have never entered.
Joanna Walsh
A trip to Paris had sounded so adventurous when I was first talking about it a year earlier. People spoke about the city with dreamy longing, as though Paris possessed a magic that could not be found elsewhere. I'd never heard anyone talk about Paris without sighing. The city was a Promised Land that held appeal for most everyone: artists, lovers, even people who just liked cheese.
Jennifer Coburn
Depending on which flavor of academic scholarship you prefer, that age had its roots in the Renaissance or Mannerist periods in Germany, England, and Italy. It first bloomed in France in the garden of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1780s. Others point to François-René de Chateaubriand’s château circa 1800 or Victor Hugo’s Paris apartments in the 1820s and ’30s. The time frame depends on who you ask. All agree Romanticism reached its apogee in Paris in the 1820s to 1840s before fading, according to some circa 1850 to make way for the anti-Romantic Napoléon III and the Second Empire, according to others in the 1880s when the late Romantic Decadents took over. Yet others say the period stretched until 1914—conveniently enduring through the debauched Belle Époque before expiring in time for World War I and the arrival of that other perennial of the pigeonhole specialists, modernism. There are those, however, who look beyond dates and tags and believe the Romantic spirit never died, that it overflowed, spread, fractured, came back together again like the Seine around its islands, morphed into other isms, changed its name and address dozens of times as Nadar and Balzac did and, like a phantom or vampire or other supernatural invention of the Romantic Age, it thrives today in billions of brains and hearts. The mother ship, the source, the living shrine of Romanticism remains the city of Paris.
David Downie
We are outside again, walking, when he takes a bite and stops dead. "Wow," he says after a minute. Then, "Wow," again.I smile. Everyone remembers their first taste of Paris. This will be his.
Kristin Hannah
Many people in Paris are quite content to look on at others, and there are plenty who regard a wall behind which something is happening as a very curious thing.
Victor Hugo
I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there's a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.All along the Seine, street lamps come on, apartment windows turn golden."It's seven," Julien says, and I realize that he has been keeping time all along, waiting. He is so American. No sitting idle, forgetting oneself, not for this young man of mine.
Kristin Hannah
Paris at night is a street show of a hundred moments you might have lived.
Courtney Maum
Wie Gott in Frankreich'' was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect happiness. I puzzled over this simile for many years, and I think I can interpret it now. God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers He too could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafes. There are few things more pleasant, more civilized than a tranquil terrasse at dusk.
Saul Bellow
To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.
Victor Hugo
Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.
Natalie Clifford Barney
I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.
Bill Bryson
At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
Quinn had never stayed at a hotel that used real keys. Most had plastic keycards--like credit cards that you slide through a sensor--though her aunt Deirdre had told her about a tiny hotel in Paris she'd once stayed at that still had brass keys attached to enormous key chains shaped like the Eiffel Tower.
Marina Cohen
Nell looks at the label and comes to."Oh, I'd never wear it. I like to buy things on a cost-per-wear basis. This dress would probably work out at like...thirty pounds a wear. No. I couldn't.""You don't ever do something just because it makes you feel good?" The assistant shrugs. "Mademoiselle, you need to spend more time in Paris.
Jojo Moyes
I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'.
Saul Bellow
Helen looked up at Paris, her face wet with tears and blotchy with grief, and nodded her consent. 'Together we are chained on rocks before the beast of Poseidon. Naked and bare and helpless.''But we are more fortunate.''How so?' Helen asked.'We have each other as comfort in our misery.
Janell Rhiannon
Do all in Troy despise me?''That is a strong word, my sweet.'The young Queen of Sparta pulled away from her lover's arms. 'It is true then. I have exchanged one prison for another.'Paris gently brushed her cheek with his hand. 'If that is true, we are the most fortunate of prisoners. For we have each other and our love.
Janell Rhiannon
Life, oblivious to his grief, continued
Julie Orringer
Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.
Victor Hugo
Nell walks what feels like the length of Paris. She walks through the numbered arrondissements, meandering through a food market, gazing at the glossy produce, both familiar and not at the same time, accepting a plum at a stallholder's urging and then buying a small bag in lieu of breakfast and lunch. She sits on a bench by the Seine, watching the tourist boats go by, and eats three of the plums, thinking of how it felt to hold the tiller, to gaze onto the moonlit waters. She tucks the bag under her arm as if she does this all the time and takes the Metro to a brocante recommended in one of her guidebooks, allowing herself an hour to float among the stalls, picking up little objects that someone once loved, mentally calculating the English prices, and putting them down again. And as she walks, in a city of strangers, her nostrils filled with the scent of street food, her ears filled with an unfamiliar language, she feels something unexpected wash through her. She feels connected, alive.
Jojo Moyes
Adele and Vladimir danced along the banks of the River Seine, the loveliness of spring a backdrop all around them.
Kristy Cambron
I was thrown together with Florence, or 'Florawns' as she was called, a pert girl of nineteen who worked in our kitchen and was sent out to help me. First, I followed her to a butcher where fat sausages hung from the ceiling like aldermen's chains, and I could choose the best of plump ducks, sides of beef, and chops standing guard like sentries on parade. Once the deal was done Florence paid him, gave me a wink and cast a trickle of coins into her apron pocket. So it seemed that serving girls will pay themselves the whole world over.The size of the Paris market made Covent Garden look like a tinker's tray. And I never before saw such neatness; the cakes arranged in pinks and yellows and greens like an embroidery, and the cheeses even prettier, some as tiny as thimbles and others great solid cartwheels. As for the King Cakes the French made for Twelfth Night, the scents of almond and caramelled sugar were to me far sweeter than any perfumed waters.
Martine Bailey
I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada’s.’ Hans Arp
Lepota L. Cosmo
I used to ask myself, ‘Sergei, would you rather spend your money on drink or women?’ and thanks to the club, I spend it on both and am called a patron of the arts.
Melika Dannese Lux
I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood.... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.
Michel de Montaigne
I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital [Paris].
Thomas Jefferson
Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.
Victor Hugo
Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.
James Baldwin
The sign above the door was written in French. It read: ARRÊTE ! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT.“That means,” he explained to Gini, “‘Stop! It is here the Empire of Death.
Paul Aertker
The wrought-iron gate squeaked as Lucas opened it. He lowered the rented bike down the stone steps and onto the sidewalk. To his right was the most famous Globe Hotel in Paris, disguised under another name. In front of the entrance five Curukians sat on mopeds. Lu-cas and his eighteen-month-old friend then shot out across the street and through the invisible beam of an-other security camera.He rode diagonally across the place de la Concorde and headed toward the river. It seemed only natural. The motorcycles trailed him. He pedaled fast across the Alex-andre III bridge and zipped past Les Invalides hospital. He tried to turn left at the Rodin Museum, but Goper rode next to him, blocking his escape.
Paul Aertker
You're going to have to settle on one eventually. Why not save us both the hassle, close your eyes and point. Whoever you're pointing at will be our winner." "I've played that game once before. Ended up--" Paris shuddered. "Never mind. It's not good to wander down that particular memory trail. So no. Just no.
Gena Showalter
Paris is a heaven for all woman's obssesions: hot men, great chocolates, scrumptuous pastries, sexy lingerie, cool clothes but, as any shoe-o-phile knows, this city is a hotbed of fabulous shoes.
Kirsten Lobe
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Willa Cather
Her little fists pummeled at him, and he accepted the abuse. Until he realized she’d made an improper fist and was actually hurting herself. He wound an arm around her waist, spun her and slammed her into the hard line of his body to still her.“Let me go!”“In a minute.” As she struggled, he pulled her thumb out from beneath her fingers and rearranged her fist. “Hit like this.” Done, he released her.
Gena Showalter
Sienna, meet Zacharel. He's a warrior angel for the One, True Deity. Zacharel, meet Sienna. She's mine.
Gena Showalter
The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
Jack Kerouac
If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child.
Victor Hugo
Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D'Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?
Margaret Anderson
Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing,going in circles, mounting each other.Paris is the city of love,even for the birds.
Samantha Schutz
Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.
Michael Simkins
In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins."And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.
David Sedaris
To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!
Victor Hugo
I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.
Amy Thomas
He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.
Victor Hugo
Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets--as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.
Anne Rice
Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.
Henry Van Dyke
They left me. My parents actually left me! IN FRANCE!
Stephanie Perkins
Dangerous as a lightning strike, as lethal as a pair of crisscrossing short swords, William whispered, “You’re about to find out how your liver tastes, my friend.”“I have tasted it already,” Zacharel said, his voice its usual monotone. The snowflakes began to fall in earnest, tiny at first, but growing in diameter. An arctic wind blustered around him. “It was a bit salty.”How the hell was a guy supposed to respond to that?Apparently William didn’t know, either, because he gaped at the angel. Then, “Maybe if you added a little pepper?”O-kay. It was official. William had an answer for everything.
Gena Showalter
I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.
Guy de Maupassant
When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
Oscar Wilde