PARIS QUOTES II
quotations about Paris, France
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
JEAN COCTEAU
Le Coq et l'Arlequin
In the 1920s and '30s artists went to Paris and had a hell of a good time, as I tried to do in '48. I went there directly after the war because I was eager to see the action. But I found no great action when I got there. There were not many flowers of culture in 1947-48. Everybody concentrated on gluing the pieces together. For artists the great age had already been petering out before the war. By the great age I mean the international culture -- the gathering in Paris of a group of great figures, few of them French: Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Diaghilev, Stravinski, and so on. It was an international culture that made Paris its headquarters. But it was French only in location.
SAUL BELLOW
Contemporary Literature, 1984
Paris is famous for its fashion, acclaimed for its art, and notorious for its nightlife, but to visit Paris and bypass the endless opportunities for sampling its wonderful cuisine is absolutely unthinkable.
SANDRA GUSTAFSON
Sandra Gustafson's Great Eats in Paris
Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people -- people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.
GEORGE ORWELL
Down and out in Paris and London
For at Paris, whenever God places a pretty woman there, the Devil in reply immediately puts a fool to keep her.
JULES BARBEY D'AUREVILLY
Les Diaboliques
You'll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.
E. A. BUCCHIANERI
Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.
G. K. CHESTERTON
All Things Considered
In Paris you're always surrounded by French people.
DAVID SEDARIS
Time Magazine, June 2004
It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle.... Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.
JAN CHRISTIAN SMUTS
New York Evening Post, March 2, 1921
After you've lived in Paris for a while, you don't want to live anywhere, including Paris.
JOHN ASHBERY
Selected Prose
Paris is "the city," isn't it, and I am a lover of cities. It can be experienced much more pleasantly and conveniently than any other city I know. It's so easy to get around on the metro, and so interesting when you get there--each arrondissement is like a separate province, with its own capital and customs and even costumes.
JOHN ASHBERY
The Paris Review, winter 1983
Of course I had always known how dazzling Paris is. But to actually live there and walk the streets -- with the massive plane trees and ancient cobblestones, the rose-tinted street lamps, the green bookstalls, and golden limestone façades -- well, the French know a little something about seduction.
AMY THOMAS
Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
Paris is an exercise in despair.
MICHAEL BRODSKY
X in Paris
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.
ANNE RICE
Interview with the Vampire
Paris is the principal city of loungers; it is laid out, built, arranged expressly for lounging.
JULES GABRIEL JANIN
The American in Paris
Paris is a shopper's dream world. Even those who claim to dislike shopping are bound to be attracted by the unending selection of shops with beautiful window displays. The haute couture, open-air marchés overflowing with beautiful foods, extravagant toy shops, and the dazzling displays of jewelry, antigues, and collectibles tempt everyone from the serious buyer to the casual browser. There has always been something very stylish about the French. Just the addition of the word French to everyday objects such as jeans, silk, perfume, bread, wine, cheese, and toast lifts them out of the ordinary. For many of us, going to Paris is a dream come true, but it isn't quite enough.... We want to bring something of Paris home with us.
SANDRA GUSTAFSON
Sandra Gustafson's Great Sleeps Paris