Paris Quotes

You'd think the sight of beautiful Place Vendôme would lift my spirits but oddly the arc of jewellery - so obviously beyond the means of a jobless person like me - only depresses me more. I plod on feeling confused, guilty even, that I should feel unhappy in a place that looks like paradise.

Sarah Turnbull

Then she stood on tiptoe and kissed him sweetly on the lips, “I promise you a love affair with a sun-bathed Austrian princess beyond anything you imagine—in love, in beauty, in intensity. A love that will power you to the end of our time together. You are going to be a fortunate man, Geoffrey Ashbrook.

Paul A. Myers

Sandrine opened her eyes to the soft gray light of early dawn. Recollections of sensual pleasure seemed to caress her body, bringing a smile to her lips. She lay back in the pillow and listened to the breathing of Philippe beside her. She lingered in the memory of the previous night, a memory that was like a warm and tender embrace, an evening of small intimate harmonies. As it should be.

Paul A. Myers

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another woman sitting over in a wing chair, a pleasantly attractive lady wearing the tasteful clothes of a senior redactrice, or senior civil servant, the stylish black skirt, the dark stockings, the black pumps, and the starched white linen blouse of her caste. The dark hair was swept up in a chignon, elegant and functional, dark eyes glistened as she smiled at him in a professional manner. He could see that she was a woman who met men in a highly assured way—serene, and expert at creating a proper distance.

Paul A. Myers

In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.

Paula McLain

I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I've seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I'm really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home.

Kristin Harmel

...but you drank your black coffee by choice, believeng that Paris was sufficient alcohol.

Malcolm Cowley

A beautiful white silk scarf was around her neck, tucked below the fur collar. Her lips were well painted into a bright red cupid’s bow. Cute as hell I always told myself, with a tinge of regret. She had a steady girlfriend.

Paul A. Myers

Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.

Henry James

...was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women...

Ann Patchett

She murmured, “I love the imagery of Sappho, the warm summer air across the velvety darkness, the lover between love’s thighs.” She stayed quiet a moment. “But it takes a man’s kiss to put the fire to the metaphor.

Paul A. Myers

When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities.

Paula McLain

The last time I saw Paris.Her heart was warm and gay.

Oscar Hammerstein II

Picasso created blank spaces through which an imagination could fly.

Peggy Kopman-Owens

My Illusionist, will you take me into a world filled with timeless magic?

Con.Template

Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing!...what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims!...that nothing got bombed!...squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in...and dancing purple fireflies...

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate : it suggested old stew and course tobacco, the coat racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was - as though the set designer had intended some ironical epilogue - the smell of the real Latin Quarter.

Graham Robb

In those days, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin de Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s : a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barriere d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give a gravedigger. ‘Never mind’, said he, “you can pay me the next time, ‘ and then, to his collegue : ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are a regular customers.

Graham Robb

The sun finally died in beauty, flinging out its crimson flames, which cast their reflection on the faces of passers-by, giving them a strangely feverish look. The darkness of the trees became deeper. You could hear the Seine flowing. Sounds carried farther, and people in their beds could feel, as they did every night, the vibration of the ground as buses rolled past.

Georges Simenon

... Paris was a city of love for unimaginative folks.

Lauren Morrill

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

If you have ever walked in Paris, you will see that Paris will ever walk in your memoires!

Mehmet Murat ildan

It is impossible for a Parisian to resist the desire to flick through the old volumes laid out by a books

Gérard de Nerval

Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognize

Marguerite Duras

Eiffel Tower" To Robert DelaunayEiffel Tower Guitar of the skyYour wireless telegraphy Attracts words As a rosebush the beesDuring the night The Seine no longer flowsTelescope or bugleEIFFEL TOWERAnd it's a hive of words Or an inkwell of honeyAt the bottom of dawn A spider with barbed-wire legs Was making its web of cloudsMy little boy To climb the Eiffel Tower You climb on a songDo 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 windOver there The hats fly away They have wings but they don't singJacqueline Daughter of France What do you see up thereThe Seine is asleep Under the shadow of its bridgesI see the Earth turning And I blow my bugleToward all the seasOn the path Of your perfume All the bees and the words go their wayOn 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 FADESEVERY FALLAND ALL FULL OF SNOW I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONGThat's the way the Tower spoke to me one dayEiffel Tower Aviary of the world Sing SingChimes of ParisThe giant hanging in the midst of the void Is the poster of FranceThe day of Victory You will tell it to the stars

Vicente Huidobro

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

Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, had little by little melted her heart.

Émile Zola

Oh ParisFrom red to green all the yellow dies awayParis Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orangeThe beautiful fruit of light("Windows")

Guillaume Apollinaire

I know the consequences, Manon,” Ilyse conceded. “I know the fate you endured might one day be my own. But I refuse to be a prisoner for the rest of my life.

Melika Dannese Lux

She was ready to be a fugitive with him for the rest of her life - 'Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people' - and when a Parisienne is ready to leave Paris behind forever, that's something. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die Spinne.

John Pearce

Dear Artie: “The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could. “Roy

John Pearce

Whenever my mum gets depressed about her age, she goes to Paris.

Jane Tara

How long since you had sex?” Aeron asked his friend. Another moan. “Two—three days.” Paris wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. Which meant Paris hadn‟t had a female since before their return. But Aeron knew Lucien had flashed the warrior into town every night they‟d spent in the desert for just that reason. Had the warrior had trouble finding a willing partner? “Let me take you into town. You can—” “No. Only want Sienna. My female. Mine.

Gena Showalter

This is what you British do not understand about the French. You think you must work, work, work, work and open on Sundays and make mothers and fathers with families slave in supermarkets at three o'clock in the morning and make people leave their homes and their churches and their children and go shopping on Sundays.''Their shops are open on Sundays?' said Benoît in surprise.'Yes! They make people work on Sundays! And through lunchtimes! But for what? For rubbish from China? For cheap clothes sewed by poor women in Malaysia? For why? So you can go more often to KFC and get full of fried chicken? You would rather have six bars of bad chocolate than one bar of good chocolate. Why? Why are six bad things better than one good thing? I don't understand.

Jenny Colgan

I know so much is going to happen here, but I just don't know how. It feels like Paris is full of so many adventures just waiting to be had.

Rachel Kapelke-Dale

There's a simplicity and a sense of adventure to being alone, and I sometimes envy you for having it, as you explore Paris. Even when you're getting your heart broken, you can still wake up and not know what's going to happen next.

Jessica Pan

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

Ernest Hemingway

There was no experience, I thought, quite as wonderful as being an American in Paris.

Ann Mah

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

Janet Flanner

They love me like a pack of wolves.Ernest

Paula McLain

God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

Victor Hugo

He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.

Simon Van Booy

She had to lift both hands to illustrate what she meant, but he just let her carry his hand with her, not about to let go. She pushed the free hand toward the one he held, apparently trying to gesture closeness. "Warm," she said again. And then she did something that undid him to the last faint whisper of his soul: she gave his hand a squeeze with fingertips that could just barely reach around his, apparently using him to indicate what she wanted to say. He meant warmth. He meant this word she couldn't find.

Laura Florand

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

Their wedding night was at a little hotel in Paris. There were walk up steps and a lovely view. And all was well for these two.

David Paul Kirkpatrick

If the king had given me for my ownParis, his citadel,And I for that must leave aloneHer whom I love so well,I'd say then to the CrownTake back your glittering townMy darling is more fair, I swear.My darling is more fair.

Richard Wilbur

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

The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still.In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat.Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis.Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener.A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls.People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone.Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica.Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment.The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet.The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless.The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers.The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out.And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis.He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him.The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out:‘Monsieur Bouvet!

Georges Simenon

Have you ever been to Paris before?" I asked Kylian."No, though from what I've seen, I'm sure it's worth a trip. And even with what little I saw I think it's quite fitting for you to be the Patroness of Paris. You're like Paris and Paris is like you.""Noisy?""A mystery.

Natalie Herzer

Hem, you know I don't think that owner's wife where you live likes me. She wouldn't let me wait upstairs for you.''I'll tell her,' I said.'Don't bother. I can always wait here. It's very pleasant in the sun now, isn't it?''It's fall now,' I said. 'I don't think you dress warmly enough.''It's only cool in the evening,' Evan said. 'I'll wear my coat.''Do you know where it is?''No. But it's somewhere safe.''How do you know?''Because I left the poem in it.

Ernest Hemingway

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves ofhuman mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whosedams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity theChristian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict oflife embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined bythe consoling beacons of ancient faith.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Parisians take their work quite seriously, but they take their enjoyment of the little moments just as seriously. Sometimes sitting in a café with close friends or family and enjoying a shared plate of macarons is just as important as sitting in an office working. You know, some Parisians start their morning with a mug of hot chocolate.Really? Emilia asked, taking a fourth and fifth sip.The chocolate is like medicine to take away your troubles and help you see that life is sweet.

Giada De Laurentiis

Crack, crack—crack, crack—crack, crack—so this is Paris! quoth I (continuing in the same mood)—and this is Paris!—humph!—Paris! cried I, repeating the name the third time— The first, the finest, the most brilliant— —The streets however are nasty; But it looks, I suppose, better than it smells—crack, crack—crack, crack—

Laurence Sterne

The Frenchman showed her a great deal of Paris that day, saying over lunch at a café that it was impossible to see everything of interest in so short a time. "And of course the sights are only one aspect; there's also the theatre, the markets, clubs, festivals, gardens and much more."Delta smiled dreamily; it sounded wonderful.Enjoying her smile, Valois gave her cheek a playful caress. "If I try hard enough, you may never want to leave.

Brooke Templar

Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.

A.J. Liebling

I had walked over to the window and was looking down at the rails of the Montmartre funicular, the gardens of the Sacré Cœur and, further off, the whole of Paris, with its lights, its roofs, its shadows. Denise Coudreuse and I had met one day in this maze of roads and boulevards. Paths that cross, among those of thousands and thousands of people all over Paris, like countless little balls on a gigantic, electric billiard table, which occasionally bump into each other. And nothing remained of this, not even the luminous trail a firefly leaves behind it.

Patrick Modiano

It's pronounced wee but spelled O-U-I. It's all you'll want to say when you're sitting at one of the thousands of little cafes that line the streets and you're looking at a menu full of foods you just want to eat for days. And then you wake up early, and the sun is rising in shades of pink over the white buildings as you make your way through the sleepy streets until you're upon the fresh markets!

Giada De Laurentiis

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

Ben Aaronovitch

All around us are complex people trying to live simple lives,” she said. “Wanting simple things with tangled hearts.

Cole McCade

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Paris Quotes

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