quotations about Paris, France
Paris is a peerless city. Liberty, equality, fraternity are not only words. They express the spirit of which Paris is made.
COUNTEE CULLEN
notebook, 1928
Paris is a heaven for all woman's obsessions: hot men, great chocolates, scrumptious pastries, sexy lingerie, cool clothes but, as any shoe-o-phile knows, this city is a hotbed of fabulous shoes.
KIRSTEN LOBE
Paris Hangover
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
WILLA CATHER
The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews
Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be.
GERTRUDE STEIN
An American in Paris
To die in Paris costs a pretty penny.
FRANCOIS ANDRIEUX
attributed, Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian
Paris is wrenchingly beautiful, and so are many of its people. If you use your eyes and take in everything, you can learn more about true style in a weekend than in a lifetime's perusal of fashion magazines.
LUCIA VAN DER POST
attributed, Sandra Gustafson's Great Sleeps Paris
My opinion on Paris remains resolute. Visiting Paris is always a privilege. Why? Because a trip to Paris is not only about visiting the place--it's a state of mind. That's what Paris is for. It's a costume party of the soul with an outrageous caterer.
DAVID APPLEFIELD
The Unofficial Guide to Paris
People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain, or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.
ROMAN PAYNE
Crepuscule
Paris is a city of centralisation--and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point. We see radiating many long arms with innumerable tentaculae, and in the centre rises a gigantic head with a comprehensive brain and keen eyes to look on every side and ears sensitive to hear--and a voracious mouth to swallow.
BRAM STOKER
"The Burial of the Rats"
Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.
MICHAEL SIMKINS
Detour de France: An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education
In Paris one is too preoccupied by what one sees and what one hears, however strong one is; what I am doing here has, I think, the merit of not resembling anyone, because it is simply the expression of what I myself have experienced.
CLAUDE MONET
letter to Frederic Bazille, December 1868
The education of the Parisian child is something corresponding to the clear avenues and the exact squares of Paris. When the Parisian boy has done learning about the French reason and the Roman order he can go out and see the thing repeated in the shapes of many shining public spaces, in the angles of the many streets.
G. K. CHESTERTON
All Things Considered
Paris is not merely an assemblage of houses, palaces, temples, and fountains; it is also a world of passions and ideas.
JULES GABRIEL JANIN
The American in Paris
Paris flared -- Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.
EMILE ZOLA
Paris
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Paris hints of sacrifice. But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker where western Venuses twang its responsive streets, and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.
EMILE ZOLA
Une page d'amour
Paris is a little better than anywhere else.
PATIENCE BLOOM
Romance Is My Day Job
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 recognizes it.
MARGUERITE DURAS
"Tourists in Paris", Outside: Selected Writings