Quotes About French

The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all kinds. This is why they have bidets.

There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From m'aidez . Help Me.

You should not be sad, he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later. The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. It is criminal, the love, he said, patting my shoulder. But none is worse.—

Do you know what it came from? said Luke. Mayday? It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help me.

It's French, he said. From m'aidez. Help me.

I'd been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.

Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.

He heard Julien's voice, with the fancy French accent illuminating the letters, just as surely as the old monks had illuminated letters when they painted them bright red or gold and decorated them with tiny figures and leaves.

This was more tantalizing than I'd ever expected, to be locked once more in conversation with her. And with pleasure I doted upon the changes in her: that her French accent was completely gone now and she sounded almost British, and that from her long years of study overseas. She'd spent some of those years in England with me.

I did not love those decadent and cynical French mummers. Those I had loved, and those who I could love, were, save for Louis de Pointe du Lac, utterly beyond my grasp. I must have Louis, that was my injunction. I knew no other. So I did not interfere when Louis incinerated the Coven, and the infamous theatre, striking at the risk of his own life, with flame and scythe at the very hour of dawn.

All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.

British and French patriotism are completely different emotions. Ours is a bit shamefaced and populist, theirs is the province of the intellectual.

You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate. There is more eloquence in a sweet touch of them than in the tongues of the whole French council.

And it is not in any of our interests to have the balance of power turned on its head like this. An overly mighty French king is no improvement over an overly mighty English one.

There is no chance for surprise," he said, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders with that French way he had. "Theyll be intrenched to the eyes.

I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

In a final spectacle, a mock sea battle was staged on the Seine between rival "French" and "Portuguese" fleets

Imagination?' said Holmes with some annoyance. 'And are the mere facts not sufficient in themselves? Must they be dressed up with French phrases dimly remembered from one's distant schooldays and hurriedly – though all too often inadequately – checked with an elementary grammar before dispatch to the publisher?

Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus ?

When ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call revery, our language has scarce a name for it.

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live.

And, do you know, I was much taken, in London, with a young authoress, Geraldine Jewsbury. You have read her books. There's a French sort of daring, half-audacious power in them, but she herself is quiet and simple, and drew my heart out of me a good deal.

Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his books, but certainly — oh certainly — he does not in a general way appreciate our French people quite with our warmth; he takes too high a standard, I tell him, and won't listen to a story for a story's sake.