"Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything."
— Steve Martin

"He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration."
— Michael Pollan

"It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for."
— Marcel Proust

"Je ne veux pas être riche. Je veux être merveilleuse"
— Marilyn Monroe

"On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"I was ecstatic when they re-named "French fries" as "freedom fries." Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots."
— Johnny Depp

"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Man is born free, but is everywhere seen bound by chains"
— Voltaire

"If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living."
— Friedrich Engels (Collected Works 38 1844-51)

"What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content."
— Paul Valéry

"On ne se souvient pas des jours, on se souvient des instants."
— Cesare Pavese

"I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence..."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove)

"Je suis comme ça. Ou j'oublie tout de suite ou je n'oublie jamais."

Samuel BECKETT, En attendant Godot

I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget. "
— Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts)

"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language."
— Mark Twain

"I don't know what it is about the french language, it seems to be scared of coming out of the mouth so it comes out the nose instead."
— P.D.Q. Bach

"La tournée terminée, Tom et Roger pensèrent qu'après le succès de I Shot The Sheriff, ce serait bien de descendre dans les Caraïbes pour continuer sur le thème du reggae. Ils organisèrent un voyage en Jamaïque, où ils jugeaient qu'on pourrait fouiner un peu et puiser dans l'influence roots avant d'enregistrer. Tom croyait fermement au bienfait d'exploiter cette source, et je n'avais rien contre puisque ça voulait dire que Pattie et moi aurions une sorte de lune de miel. Kingston était une ville où il était fantastique de travailler. On entendant de la musique partout où on allait. Tout le monde chantait tout le temps, même les femmes de ménage à l'hotel. Ce rythme me rentrait vraiment dans le sang, mais enregistrer avec les Jamaïcains était une autre paire de manches.

Je ne pouvais vraiment pas tenir le rythme de leur consommation de ganja, qui était énorme. Si j'avais essayé de fumer autant ou aussi souvent, je serais tombé dans les pommes ou j'aurais eu des hallucinations. On travaillait aux Dynamic Sound Studios à Kingston. Des gens y entraient et sortaient sans arrêt, tirant sur d'énormes joints en forme de trompette, au point qu'il y avait tant de fumée dans la salle que je ne voyais pas qui était là ou pas. On composait deux chansons avec Peter Tosh qui, affalé sur une chaise, avait l'air inconscient la plupart du temps. Puis, soudain, il se levait et interprétait brillamment son rythme reggae à la pédale wah-wah, le temps d'une piste, puis retombait dans sa transe à la seconde où on s'arrêtait."
— Eric Clapton (Eric Clapton: The Autobiography)

"...with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"Etre dans le vent, c'est avoir le destin des feuilles mortes."
— Jean Guitton

"Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it."
— Nigel Slater (The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater)

"People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach."
— Marguerite de Navarre

"I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one)."
— Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)

"ALPHA-60: Your name is written "Ivan Johnson," but it is pronounced "Lemmy Caution," Secret Agent Zero Zero Three of the Outlands. You are a threat to the security of Alphaville.

CAUTION: I refuse to become what you call "normal."

...

ALPHA-60: You cannot escape. The door is locked.

CAUTION: Try to stop me, pal."
— Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville)

""Few things are needful to make the wise man happy, but nothing satisfies the fool---and this is the reason why so many of mankind are miserable." "
— La Rochefoucauld

"I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction."
— Stéphane Mallarmé (Mallarme in Prose)

"You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all!"
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"...because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a
friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive
politeness."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"What isn’t clear, isn’t French."
— Antoine de Rivarol

"We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor."
— The Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection)

"To call the population of strangers in the midst of which we live "society" is such a usurpation that even the sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like "colleague," "contact," "buddy," acquaintance," or "date." Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity."
— The Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection)

"The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit."
— The Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection)

"vive les etats-unis, vive la france, et vive l'amite franco-americanne.
-Nicholas Sarsoky (the french president)
(Translation: Long live the United States, Long live France, and long live the French-American friendship)"
— Nicholas Sarsoky

"The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her
husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had
always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she
displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would
never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find
tranquillity."
— Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Volume III: the Guermantes Way)

"Sève qui monte et fleur qui pousse,
Ton enfance est une charmille :
Laisse errer mes doigts dans la mousse
Où le bouton de rose brille.
"
— Verlaine (Oeuvres Poetiques*)

"Un soir qu'ils étaient couchés l'un près de l'autre, comme elle lui demandait d'inventer un poème qui commencerait par je connais un beau pays, il s'exécuta sur-le-champ. Je connais un beau pays Il est de l'or et d'églantine Tout le monde s'y sourit Ah quelle aventure fine Les tigres y sont poltrons Les agneaux ont fière mine À tous les vieux vagabonds Ariane donne des tartines. Alors, elle lui baisa le la main, et il eut honte de cette admiration."
— Albert Cohen (Belle Du Seigneur)

"Few things are needful to make the wise man happy, but nothing satisfies the fool---and this is the reason why so many of mankind are miserable.
"
— La Rochefoucauld

"He (Lafcadio) was sitting all alone in a compartment of the train which was carrying him away from Rome, & contemplating–not without satisfaction–his hands in their grey doeskin gloves, as they lay on the rich fawn-colored plaid, which, in spite of the heat, he had spread negligently over his knees. Through the soft woolen material of his traveling-suit he breathed ease and comfort at every pore; his neck was unconfined in its collar which without being low was unstarched, & from beneath which the narrow line of a bronze silk necktie ran, slender as a grass snake, over his pleated shirt. He was at ease in his skin, at ease in his shoes, which were cut out of the same doeskin as his gloves; his foot in its elastic prison could stretch, could bend, could feel itself alive. His beaver hat was pulled down over his eyes & kept out the landscape; he was smoking dried juniper, after the Algerian fashion, in a little clay pipe & letting his thoughts wander at their will …"
— Andre Gide

""Ponder well on this point: the pleasant hours of our life are all connected by a more or less tangible link, with some memory of the table."
"
— Charles Pierre Monselet (1825-1888)

"French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they’re threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
"
— David Stanley (Moon Tahiti)

"Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"The entire act open to us, forever and alone, consists in seizing, while we're waiting, the rare or multiple links, according to some inner state and what we can hear when we try, thus simplifying the world. This is what equals the art of creation: the notion of an object, escaping, that we need."
— Stéphane Mallarmé

"The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her
husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had
always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she
displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that would
never bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can find
tranquillity."
— Marcel Proust

""Ma patrie, c'est la langue francaise.""
— Albert Camus