Paris Quotes

“Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Copying is out of the question; only fools and impostors copy. No, the thing is to produce something as good, if possible, out of your own resources. And so begins the strange torture of the blank sheet of paper, where you must open a window that is not the one I spotted just now but one equally insistent in its truthfulness.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“What we give the world, we have borrowed from no one; it is ours. It may be taken from us, stolen from us, but imitated? - never.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Paris … is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers.…”
― Julian Green, Paris

“Bom ou mau, aquilo que sai da Paris é Paris, seja uma carta, um pedaço de pão, um par de sapatos ou um poema.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“A cidade, efectivamente, sorri apenas àqueles que se aproximam dela e que deambulam pelas suas ruas; a esses, ela fala numa linguagem tranquilizadora e familiar, mas a alma de Paris só se revela de longe e do alto, e é no silêncio do céu que se escuta o imenso grito patético de orgulho e de fé que ela eleva na direcção das nuvens.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“I am the road running through Paris," says the Seine. 'I have carried off many images since you were a child and reflected many clouds. I am changeable, but as people are: I have my moments of happiness in the June dawn and my sinister times some December evenings. Above all I am inquisitive - you call it being in flood. We have something in common, you everlasting passers-by and I, the fleeing water, which is that we never go back: your time is my space.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“and at that point the church quietly articulated these words, which tell us something of the secret of old buildings: 'The worse I am threatened, the lovelier I become.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Things we could not tell each other with the width of the Atlantic between us we communicated from heart to heart in those imaginary conversations.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“A alma de uma grande cidade não se deixa apreender facilmente; é preciso, para se comunicar com ela, termo-nos aborrecido, termos de algum modo sofrido nos lugares que a circunscrevem.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“...quando me passeio por Passy parece-me que deambulo por dentro de mim mesmo e que tropeço incessantemente na minha infância.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Have you never noticed how absorbed people look as they climb from floor to floor? So many resolutions reached, so many anxious questions to which the answers lie in wait behind the door that is about to open! Here on the stairs is the time and the place for making up your mind, that final moment for reflection before you take the plunge. As a result there appears to linger, in some of those great circular stairwells, a residue of the dreams that they have sheltered, a memory, as it were, of the meditations in which love, lust, and world-weariness fought for the hearts of all the nameless people who ever passed that way.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“You used to be able to push open the little door inside the church and find yourself in a delightful piece of waste ground, covered with vegetation, where your feet might stumble against some of the oldest stones in Paris. Hard by the chevet of St Julian one of the last vestiges of 'Philippe Auguste's Wall' stuck up abruptly out of the long grass like a rock emerging from the sea, and a twisted tree, slowly dying beneath the weight of several centuries, still sprouted leaves that quivered overhead. Who remembers that place, so attuned to day-dreaming? In the distance the towers of Notre-Dame, white in stormy weather, looked black against the July sky, and the occasional tugboat on the Seine would utter a long-drawn-out, melancholy cry, the misty note lingering, and fading into the blue beyond. Yet the hubbub of Paris seemed to die at the edges of that small solitude where I loved to come and think. The silence around me was like a dwelling in which the past had sought refuge.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“...because one of the privileges of Paris, one of its rarest graces, bestowed only on those who know how to WASTE TIME there, is suddenly to show itself in unusual guises...”
― Julian Green, Paris

“ils faisaient des ombres avec des couleurs claires (they made shadows with bright colours)”
― Julian Green, Paris

“Year by year I see trees disappearing. It's no good people saying they replant: you never find the same number. Each time there are fewer of them to raise their young arms towards the sun once again or shake their tresses in the wind.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“It has become somewhat trite, nowadays, to say that after so many years of destruction it is a kind of miracle that Paris is still standing, a miracle we thrill to every day. But if the beauty of Paris has survived wars, how extraordinary that it can do nothing against the pickaxes of the Parisians themselves when they make up their minds to demolish something, nor against the vagaries of their architects left to their own devices!”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Paris est une ville dont on pourrait parler au pluriel, comme les Grecs l’a fait avec Athène. Car il y a beaucoup de Paris et celui des touristes n'a qu'une relation superficielle avec celui des Parisiens. Un étranger qui traverse Paris dans en voiture ou en autobus et qui va d'un musée à l’autre n'a aucune idée de ce monde qu'il ne voit pas, bien qu'il soit dans elle.
Personne ne peut affirmer de connaître bien une ville s'il n'a pas perdu son temps dans elle. L'âme d'une grande ville ne laisse pas se comprendre légèrement. Pour qu’on se familiarise vraiment avec elle, on doit dans elle, on a dû s’ennuyer et pâtir un peu dans elle. Bien sûr, chacun peut s'acheter un guide de la ville et constater que tous les monuments indiqués sont là. Mais, à l'intérieur de la frontière de Paris, une ville qui est accessible autant dure que Tombouctou l’était autrefois se cache.”
― Julien Green, Paris