The Streets of Paris Quotes

“Beauty is in the streets,” they say in Paris. We travelers know our favorites, Parisians know theirs. Jean Genet liked to stand with his friend Giacometti at the foot of rue Oberkampf, taking in its long uphill from the Marais to Belleville. Simone Weil loved walking the quays of Île Saint-Louis in her native river city. The scruffy streets of the ninth were François Truffaut’s muse and mother.

As cities evolve and erupt, streets change; Parisians come and go. But the beauty remains.”
― Susan Cahill, The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History

“The name Patrick Modiano drew a blank in the States when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. But in Paris, his home city, his many novels (more than thirty) are read, the screenplay he wrote for Louis Malle’s masterpiece Lacombe, Lucien remains a favorite, and the songs he wrote for Françoise Hardy you hear in cafés and on the radio. Still, Modiano, as man and artist, remains a mystery man. The search for phantoms of history is his basic plotline, the searches as well as the enigmatic love stories, all of which take place along the streets of Paris.”
― Susan Cahill, The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History

“Though a prose writer (of over fifty novels and a journalist and memoirist of forty books of nonfiction), Colette (1873–1954) lives on in literary history as the poet of the flesh—male, female, androgynous, young, aging, old, animal, vegetable. Proust, who praised her “voluptuous and bitter” soul, wept over some of her pages, André Gide “devoured [her] at a gulp.”
― Susan Cahill, The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History

“The Louvre’s much restored three wings or pavilions, the Sully, Denon, and Richelieu, were once the galleries where courtiers enjoyed royal hospitality and entertainments (and The Princesse de Clèves her secret surges of immoral passion). On a quiet un-crowded evening visit to the Louvre, it’s easy to imagine the masked and dancing couples in these pavilions, the rustle of silk, the whisperings of lovers, the royal entourage.

The Louvre’s art collection was the result of François I’s enterprising enthusiasm for Italian art. He imported masterpieces by Uccello, Titian, Giorgione, and, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci himself, whose Mona Lisa—La Joconde in French—was and remains the most valued painting in the royal collection. Montaigne does not mention the paintings or the Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini whom François also imported to help transform gloomy Paris into a city of bright and saucy opulence.”
― Susan Cahill, The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History

“For those who had known the couple in the time of their rapture, her absence from his funeral at the Church of the Madeleine on October 30, 1849, felt more like a haunting presence.”
― Susan Cahill, The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History

“As the Anglo-French historian and indefatigable walker Richard Cobb put it, “Paris should be both walkable and walked, if the limitless variety, the unexpectedness, the provincialism, the rusticity, the touching eccen-tricity are to be appreciated.”

With The Streets of Paris as your guide, you’ll walk the quartiers of such original geniuses as Patrick Modiano, Édith Piaf, Colette, Jean Moulin, good king Henri IV—you’ll find all these names in the book’s Contents.”
― Susan Cahill, The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History