Quotessence
Home / Topics / French People Quotes

French People Quotes

Browse 16 quotes about French People.

French People Quotes

“What everyone agreed was not very nice, was the way Clémence had carried on. Obviously, she wasn't the kind of girl you'd ask again: she'd ended up showing off everything she'd got, and she'd puked all down one of the muslin curtains and completely ruined it. At least the men did go into the street to do it; Lorilleux and Poisson, when they felt queer, managed to dash as far as the pork-butcher's shop. Breeding always tells.”

DrinkingVomitingFrench PeoplePukingL Assommoir
Author:Zola, Eacute;mile
Create image

“Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.”

ParisEssaysFrenchEnglishSnobberyMarcel ProustRevisionismFrench People1981In Search Of Lost TimeJohn RuskinBen SonnenbergGrand Street MagazineTerence Kilmartin
Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Create image

“The French are like a coin with a different face on either side of it (every coin has two faces), for every action there is an equally strong opposing idea that vibrates on the other end within them like the receiving side of a series of ripples in a pond. But this is all happening within themselves. The French are exactly like their own language: there are too many letters but then you're not supposed to pronounce them!”

French People
Author:C. JoyBell C.
Create image

“I came from a place where everyone was friendly, where even funeral directors told you to have a nice day as you left to bury your grandmother – but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was [rude]. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. ‘No, no,’ you would say, hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.’ The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.”

ParisFrench People
Book:Neither here nor there: travels in Europe
Create image