The Devil in France Quotes

“It was not living, it was vegetation. We longed for death.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“It has always been a blessed experience with me after an illness to feel that I was recovering.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Had I not been thinking always of the ludicrous aspects of my own plight, or of the plight of others, I could not have survived that depressing, degrading experience without spiritual harm.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“But one should not trust first impulses. Instinct is not always a safe counsellor by any means.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“my delight in philology, my insistence on having language clear-cut and exact, impels me, when someone says it is cold and someone else that it is warm, to look at the thermometer and say: “Gentlemen, it is 69 degrees Fahrenheit in this room.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“I am always thinking of that remark of Theodor Lessing, which I quoted earlier in this book, that history is “the art of giving meaning to the meaningless.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“There were of course exceptions, but on the whole the “intellectuals” among us withstood the hardships of the journey resignedly and patiently. They proved to be tougher, quieter, more uncomplaining than many men from other walks of life who were physically stronger and physically better trained.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“However small we made ourselves, we took space and air from our neighbours. We were a torment to one another.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“I am a slow worker, but I could have written at least two books more in the time that I have been obliged to spend waiting around public offices and in the back yards of recruiting stations—waiting unnecessarily for unnecessary things.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The years that had passed had displayed vividly before our eyes the fickleness of human attitudes.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Without papers it was simply impossible to move from a hostile France across a hostile Spain and a not exactly sympathetic Portugal and thence reach an overseas country that was itself fussily bureaucratic.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Both of us had long since learned to take the stupidity and indolence of men for granted and as things of which it was superfluous to speak.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Even French mothers of French soldiers were interned if they had been born in Germany or were wives of Germans resident in France.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“My secretary was interned though she was of Swiss citizenship, and her sister, though a British subject.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The French indiscriminately interned any women who had at any time had anything to do with Central Europe.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The Nihilist intelligentzia had sustained the thesis that writing was merely a pastime like any other, an empty amusement of the writer like sports or liquor or whoring or what you will. I had never accepted that view.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“What a useless life I had led. Often enough in hours of normal health I had debated the value of writing books. What did one accomplish by writing, what influence did one exert, what improvements did one effect?”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Our wives, German women or French women as they may have been, stood loyally by us and wisely, cool-headedly, did what they could to help us all.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“I thought of my Levantine later on when the Vichy government proclaimed laws against Jews that were modelled on those of Nürnberg.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“If the government, by its sloth and criminal irresponsibility, had brought us, guests of France, into the dangerous situation that now faced us, the French people were doing their utmost to help us out of it.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“To listen to his subtle comments on events of the present was like listening to a gentleman from the Biedermeier period expressing opinions about a modern airplane factory.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The patrolling of the roads was slackest around the noon hour, for to the French police, as to other Frenchmen, mealtime was a sacred hour.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“However, one could not forget how negligent the French army authorities could be. French honour, French hospitality, well and good; but so far at every critical juncture je-m’en-foutisme, the French Devil, had carried the day.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“After all, they said, the French Fascists now in power had identical interests with the Germans. Les loups ne se mangent pas entre eux—wolf does not eat wolf. Hitler’s government and Laval’s government were playing into each other’s hands.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“As a writer I happen to be interested in the interrelations between two domains of intellectual activity, between two sciences, if you prefer; the interrelations between history and philology, to be specific.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“The pushing, the scrambling, the hustle and bustle apart from which politics is inconceivable, utterly disgust me. My delight is contemplation and delineation.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“It is no less astonishing how many subjects—historical, philological, biological, sociological, economic—people regard as politics”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“What is the use of being a writer of some note if one cannot treat oneself to such a luxury?”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“It may be that I have sought to cultivate that trait in myself to such a high degree because I think of myself primarily as a writer. The chief satisfaction in the whole business of writing, it seems to me, comes down to saying what is, or what you think is.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940

“Call the mania intellectual integrity, call it impertinence if you will. In any event that impertinence, that intellectual integrity, is one of my most conspicuous traits and one that differentiates me from the majority of my contemporaries.”
― Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940