Quotes from Sarah Turnbull

The person serving feels inferior to the person being served so they try and show they are important by being rude.

But appreciation of beauty can also creep up on you. It can be a taste acquired through experience, time, love and deepening knowledge.

Living in Paris requires constant effort: effort to make myself understood, effort to understand and to be alert for those cultural intricacies that can turn even going to the post office into a social adventure.

Les françaises—particularly parisiennes, she stresses—perceive those of the same sex as rivals, not as potential friends.

It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.

The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?" (pp.281-82)

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.

Gallic rocker Eddy Mitchell bounces

In Paris, I love having lunch at La Cloche des Halles, a smoky wine bar with a huge ham on the counter and sturdy wines by the glass. To me this simple fare is soul food.

For example, if you're a guest it is not polite to ask to use the host's toilet, apparently: they might feel embarrassed because it isn't presentable for guests. And as a host, don't, whatever you do, pass the cheese platter more than once. It's considered ill-mannered, I read, after I'd done precisely that at least five hundred times.

French or Foe, is a perennial bestseller, flying off shop

reiterates the author Polly Platt, which, of course, is exactly what I've

The truth is, I'm not ready to go home... Oh, sure, you'll travel and go abroad again but future trips will not stretch toward infinity like this one, they won't contain so many possibilities. Heading home is the full stop marking the end of adventure; the beginning of a responsible life. And despite twelve months of travelling, I am not ready to be responsible.

Soixante-huitards, for sure, Frédéric says afterward, meaning they probably threw a few cobblestones in 1968.

I should buy Le Monde. It is, after all, the chosen newspaper of les intellos and it remains the benchmark in France for good journalism.

I don't buy Le Figaro, either. Not because it's a right-leaning paper but because I can't forgive it for "Madame," its weekend magazine full of beauty and fashion, the very name of which, it seems to me, implies that lipsticks and liposuction are far more interesting to women than the main magazine devoted

But ironically it's precisely this state of poetic perfection—so appealing to visitors—that can become oppressive when you live here.

times it's like living in a gorgeous museum. Even the people don't look quite real—those perfect-looking parents with perfect children in spotless navy coats. I dream of pushing them into puddles.

clochards—homeless people who have been living on the same streets for so long that no one can remember a time when they weren't there.

The city is a testament to civilization. Of course, I know from the last year that living in a gorgeous environment isn't enough to make you happy. But breathtaking beauty of any kind is moving. It makes tourists of us all. It anchors your heart to a place.

Palais Royal gardens. An oasis of calm beauty

concept that to me is totally foreign: looking scruffy is selfish. Not only do you look like a slob but you let down the whole city.

The loaded phrase "se mettre en valeur" is used all the time. It means "to make the most of yourself." This is not something the French do when they feel like it: they do it every day.

She epitomizes the look French women aspire to: a mix of aristocratic beauty spiced with a dash of modern mum.