Desespoir Des Quotes

My first district was Northwest Iowa. In 2002, it became North Central Iowa hooking around Des Moines down to the south, clear up to the northeast corner of the state. ~ Tom Latham

Two men appeared.
One came from the Bastille, the other from the Jardin des Plantes. The taller of the two, in a linen costume, walked with his hat pushed back, waistcoat undone and cravat in hand. The smaller one, whose body was enveloped in a brown frock-coat, had a peaked cap on his bent head.
When they came to the middle of the boulevard they both sat down at the same moment on the same seat.
Each took off his hat to mop his brow and put it beside him; and the smaller man noticed, written inside his neighbour's hat, Bouvard; while the latter easily made out the word Pécuchet, in the cap belonging to the individual in the frock-coat. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Das Unglück des Menschen rührt daher, daß er nicht still in seinem Zimmer bleiben will, dort, wo er hingehört. Sagt Pascal."
(Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs. Pascal said that) ~ Suskind

The Neimoidian gave a long, gurgling sigh. You're right, Des. The decision is made. Grim fate and ill fortune have conspired against you. It's not like sabacc; you can't fold a bad hand. In life you just play the cards you're dealt. ~ Drew Karpyshyn

For to give is the business of the rich.
[Lat., Denn Geben ist Sache des Reichen.] ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

But I knew I wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with me, too, and also knew what he wanted to do with his life. So, we compromised. He took the job in Des Moines, and it was my responsibility to get a job that would make enough money for what we needed, and that I enjoyed enough. I didn't have to love it, but it didn't matter whether I did, either, because I had him. I kept trying new things, too, and eventually discovered pottery. It's fun, of course, but the most important part is that I didn't feel like my job had to be my everything."

This is what I have to keep reminding myself. Sometimes a job can just be a job. We aren't all going to win the rat race. "I know. ~ Christina Lauren

I had joined Yes in 1971. I was a classically trained musician who had worked with numerous artists as a session musician. I played on David Bowie's 'Life On Mars,' Cat Stevens's 'Morning Has Broken' and even on some Des O'Connor records, though I kept that quiet. ~ Rick Wakeman

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city. ~ Bill Bryson

Their train speeds through the cities and crosses rivers until it reaches Paris. They leave the station, their arms around each other, and walk to the Jardin des Plantes where the panther paces the length of his cage. The young teacher nods as Hannelore Beier reaches into the cage, and strokes the animal's magnificent neck. The panther arches his back. A curtain lifts from his pupils as the pastor's sister slides aside the bolt that has kept him in captivity. His eyes like sudden, green flames, he recognizes a world beyond the bars of his cage. ~ Ursula Hegi

Most of the pubs had barred Des, but he came in to the Tiger bar and he points to me and says, 'And you, out! I want you by the back of the car park.' So I obliged him and proceeded to kick the poor cunt all around the car park, he ended up in hospital for a week! Eventually, when he came out of hospital he said that I was the best thing that had happened to him, I'd cured him! ~ Stephen Richards

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism ~ Bill Bryson

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence 'Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde oui le rire des filles elate le mieux … ' as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face. ~ Virginia Woolf

I have seen the Virgin
in an appletree at Chartres
And Saint Joan burn
at the Bella Union.
I have seen giraffes in junglejims
their necks like love
wound around the iron circumstances
of the world.
I have seen the Venus Aphrodite
armless in her drafty corridor.
I have heard a siren sing
at One Fifth Avenue.
I have seen the White Goddess dancing
in the Rue des Beaux Arts
on the Fourteenth of July
and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy
picking her nose in Chumley's. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy for it.

(Les hommes sont tous les mêmes. L'étrangeté leur déplaît, d'homme à homme, et les blesse ; mais si l'étrangeté porte des jupes, ils en raffolent.) ~ Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly

I don't want a politician who's thinking about fashion for even one millisecond. It's the same as medical professionals. The idea of a person in a Comme des Garcons humpback dress giving me a colonoscopy is just not groovy. ~ Simon Doonan

Jimi Hendrix often spoke about being a messenger. His hope was that his music might somehow pierce our hearts and heal our souls. He finally did go so far out that he couldn't find his way back in, but he did us all a huge favor - he left his music with us. ~ Des Barres, Pamela

In the past the French came to Germany less with the desire to understand it than with a zealous desire to interpret, to analyze it dispassionately something for which their training at the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the French language superbly equipped them to do. ~ Walter Abish

To know how to dissemble is the knowledge of kings.
[Fr., Savoir dissimuler est le savoir des rois.] ~ Cardinal Richelieu

Ce fut le temps sous de clairs ciels,
(Vous en souvenez-vous, Madame?)
De baisers superficiels
Et des sentiments à fleur d'âme.

It was a time of cloudless skies,
(My lady, do you recall?)
Of kisses that brushed the surface
And feelings that shook the soul. ~ Paul Verlaine

903AL RAGHIF is now available in French (LE PAIN) beautifully translated by Fifi Abou Dib. Check it out!
Publisher: Acte Sud/ L'Orient des livres ~ Toufic Youssef Aouad

I was floating around in the Garden of Eden, thrilled to be a human being at the Human-Be-In, knowing the world could be saved if we loved one another. I was draped in flowers, bestowed upon me by my brothers and sisters. I was laughing, loving, breathing Princess of Peace ... ~ Pamela Des Barres

What you need to do in conflict resolution is to bring the people who believe that the answer to their political ambitions will be achieved through violence into a frame of mind that they accept that their political ambitions will be delivered by politics. ~ Des Browne

With characteristic exuberance Tom named this curiously constructed
house Castel des Tours saunz Nowmbre, which means the Castle of
Innumerable Towers. David Montefiore had counted the innumerable
towers in 1764. There were fourteen of them. ~ Susanna Clarke

Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely amiable by nature; he is always amiable as if on command, out of calculation. If, for instance, he sees the necessity of being fantastic, original, out of the ordinary, then his fantasy, being most stupid and unnatural, assembles itself out of a priori accepted and long-trivialized forms. The natural Frenchman consists of a most philistine, petty, ordinary positiveness
in short, the dullest being in the world. In my opinion, only novices, and Russian young ladies in particular, are attracted to Frenchmen. Any decent being will at once notice and refuse to put up with this conventionalism of the pre-established forms of salon amiability, casualness, and gaiety. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Once I saw Desjardins' house, I hated him even more. It was a huge mansion on the other side of the Tuileries, on the rue des Pyramids.
"Pyramids Road?" Sadie said. "Obvious, much?"
"Maybe he couldn't find a place on Stupid Evil Magician Street," I suggested. ~ Rick Riordan

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of seconds necessary for the boiling of an egg, he perceived, after waiting a minute, that he held the egg in his hand, and had placed his seconds watch (an instrument of great value on account of its mathematical precision) to boil!
This absence of mind reminds one of the mathematician Ampere, who one day, as he was going to his course of lectures, noticed a little pebble on the road; he picked it up, and examined with admiration the mottled veins. All at once the lecture which he ought to be attending to returned to his mind; he drew out his watch; perceiving that the hour approached, he hastily doubled his pace, carefully placed the pebble in his pocket, and threw his watch over the parapet of the Pont des Arts. ~ Camille Flammarion

I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving. ~ Umberto Eco

Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The opposite of what is noised about concerning men and things is often the truth.
[Fr., Le contraire des bruits qui courent des affaires ou des personnes est souvent la verite.] ~ Jean De La Bruyere

I hated cats. I was a dog lover," Des says with a shrug. "What's the point of a cat? They're not affectionate. But that's because it's not my cat. I mean, your wife wouldn't jump on my lap. That's because she's your wife, not mine. Until you have your own cat, you really don't understand. ~ Denise Flaim

At three o'clock in the afternoon, all the fashionable world at Nice may be seen on the Promenade des Anglais - a charming place, for the wide walk, bordered with palms, flowers, and tropical shrubs, is bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the grand drive, lined with hotels and villas, while beyond lie orange orchards and the hills. Many nations are represented, many languages spoken, many costumes worn, and on a sunny day the spectacle is as gay and brilliant as a carnival. Haughty English, lively French, sober Germans, handsome Spaniards, ugly Russians, meek Jews, free-and-easy Americans, all drive, sit, or saunter here, chatting over the news, and criticizing the latest celebrity who has arrived - Ristori or Dickens, Victor Emmanuel or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands. ~ Louisa May Alcott

What are the important issues there? Khalil asked. What do left and right disagree on? As I began to answer him, as I enumerated the divisive issues, I felt faintly embarrassed at how tawdry they were: abortion, homosexuality, gun control - Khalil looked confused by that last term, and Farouq said des armes. ~ Teju Cole

It's hard to pass up a pole vault opportunity here in Des Moines. The crowd was so great when I was at the mall and I was pumped up and I thought technically I was on and I figured where else to open up my outdoor season than here. ~ Jenn Suhr

Some odd things were found; among other things the skeleton of an ourang-outang which disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable appearance of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil finally drowned himself in the sewer. ~ Victor Hugo

The ability to send applications by post allows fraudsters to apply in false or stolen identities without fear of arrest and to make multiple applications in the hope of getting one through. It allows the possibility of passports being applied for with the photographs of people who are outside the U.K. and seeking to enter illegally. ~ Des Browne

I consider myself a Chicagoan now, having lived in the city since I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in accounting. I came here often when I went to Maine West High School out in Des Plaines, which is a short drive west on the Kennedy or a short Blue Line ride toward O'Hare airport, the next-to-last stop in fact. My friends and I would take the Blue Line downtown and then transfer to the Red or Brown Line up to Belmont and Clark, our favorite part of the city when we were 16 and 17, mainly because of The Alley - a store that sold concert shirts, posters, spiked bracelets and stuff like that - and Gramophone Records, the electronic music store that took my virginity, so to speak. - 1st paragraph from Sophomoric Philosophy ~ Victor David Giron

Chesterfield 1, Chester 1. Another score draw in the local derby ~ Des Lynam

Look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/ ... ~ Bob Dylan

If you want to be a comedian, go out. Do a week in Des Moines, Iowa. Try to make those people laugh. ~ Nick Swardson