The Only Street in Paris Quotes

“The French are obsessed with history, partly out of a genuine affinity for the past, partly from a desire to cling to lost glory.”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“An American writer who had come to visit France . . . asked quite naturally what it was that had kept me here so long. . . It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets. —HENRY MILLER ON LIVING IN PARIS”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“Paris . . . is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urgent business requires their presence elsewhere. —”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“led her into a world of adventure and chance that comes with going secondhand. Taking my friends to secondhand shops on and around the rue des Martyrs is at the top of my must-do-in-Paris list. It”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“Consuming alcohol in public is allowed in France, which means drinkers overflow onto the sidewalk, especially on the Montmartre stretch. But it rarely gets out of control.”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“His message grew more urgent. “It is now our responsibility and yours, young students, to tell others they must remember so that it will never again be possible for police to come into our classrooms as hunters,” he said. “French police came to hunt down French girls, classmates of women who are with us tonight. Be vigilant so that it never happens again. Because anything is possible, always, always. You students must transmit the message to your generation that you must not discriminate, that you must not differentiate, that there can be no killing for religion or skin color.”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“He called him (it was always a man) a flâneur. “The crowd is his habitat, as air is for the bird or water for the fish,” he wrote. “His passion and his profession is to wed the crowd. . . . To be away from home, but to feel oneself everywhere at home.”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs