French Poets Quotes

My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection. ~ Henry Rollins

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. ~ Paul Valery

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Old St Petersburg remains a beautiful stage set but to the Russians it is not what Rome is to the Italians or Paris to the French. The decisions are made in the Kremlin. The city of Peter remains a museum, open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. ~ Joseph Wechsberg

The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern. ~ Annie Finch

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together. ~ Roger McGough

The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong. ~ Mike Jay

She broke off a piece of bacon and offered it to the cat who sat staring holes through her.
"For him, this is makeup sex. That's all you get," she said when Galahad inhaled the bacon then affectionately butted his head against her calf.

"Just FYI, if you let another man rub up against you, and I sniff it out, you won't be able to buy me off with bacon." He handed her the syrup pitcher so she could drown her French toast.
"So noted. ~ J.D. Robb

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties. ~ John Gardner

It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats - an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. ~ Richard Yates

The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. 'French fries', say the menus, but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry-textured substance with the taste of plastic wood. ~ Russell Baker

Last night I ordered a whole meal in French. Even the waiter was amazed - it was a Chinese restaurant! ~ Henny Youngman

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model. ~ Marilyn French

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow. ~ Karl Shapiro

The King did not summon the Estates because he needed them, but out of his own pleasure. ~ Jacques Necker

That was your brilliant plan?" I whispered. I turned my T-shirt so the spatter of blood faced my back, then slipped my jacket on over the top.
"You," he said, sitting on the bed, "were in a state of déshabillé.¨
¨Since when do you speak French?"
"I did suffer through two solid years of class with Monsieur Cann," he said. "I wasn't sleeping the whole time."
"No, of course not. You woke up during the lesson on how to describe the scandalously underdressed."
"I also know in flagrante," he said, "and coitus interruptus -"
"That's Latin," I protested, but he was laughing.
"I hope it was worth it." He swept a hand across the room. "Did you find what you needed?"
"I always do."
Watson's eyes crinkled at the corners. He didn't pry further. How glorious that was; it gave my mind time to sort and contextualize what I'd found. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards. ~ Robert Gottlieb

I'm quite into the French way - simple elegance with just a suggestion of sexiness, nothing vulgar. ~ Michelle Dockery

No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you're nothing on your own and you're a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist at all. And that doesn't just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I'd do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved good-bye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I'd still be the same person I am today. ~ Tana French

In other words, you're justifying the Hundred Years' War.'

'More or less. For it enabled our two peoples to become deeply interdependent, allowing the most fruitful of intellectual exchanges.'

'You mean, the French are "anglicized" without knowing it.'

'And the English have assimilated their Continental experience from that time much more than you think. But this is what I was leading up to: the Englishman is essentially a mystical being. And, because he's scrupulous, he's apprehensive. And therefore susceptible to everything that might be interpreted as a superhuman manifestation, whether it be a legend of esoteric significance - as in this case - or an event of peculiar resonance. Don't forget, all the official bodies in Paris - parliament, clergy, and especially the university - were in favour of the English at the period I'm talking about.'

'Of course! ~ Jacques Yonnet

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words. ~ Octavio Paz

Most of the books of erotic poetry available today are either too old or are big anthologies covering the same poets and poems. There is a lack of new and original work. Most of us have read something from Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or from the Kama Sutra. But love is a theme that should be celebrated with freshness. ~ Salil Jha

There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories. ~ Kai Nielsen

At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine - and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When ~ Yann Martel

It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand. ~ Fredrik Bajer

Of course, figuring out what actually works in reducing childhood obesity is not really the point of these programs. (If it were, then the government might finally stop categorizing french fries as "vegetables.") The real point is the same thing it always is: conformity, control, and eventually fundamental transformation. ~ Glenn Beck

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up ... then down ... then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It's a tired reading style. I'm sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves - as they've been arranged - could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name. ~ Gabrielle Hamilton

If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it's amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do. ~ Martin Amis

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. ~ Noam Chomsky

Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds. ~ Amiri Baraka

It was sex, it was fucking, and it was making love. It was life in glorious technicolour, full of promise and joy. The best of all worlds, with the best of all men. ~ Kitty French

While I'm sure people in Britain have money worries, they don't have them like the French do. The French, however much money they have, are worried. They're a very stressed people. It seems to be a very essential component of the national psyche. ~ Jonathan Meades

Go to the poets, they will speak to thee
More perfectly of purer creatures
~ William Wordsworth

AS their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East - the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the p. 2 threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchant. merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day - Ki shan i Romani - Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know. ~ Charles Godfrey Leland

I just dreamed about living in Paris and being French. I always loved the visual arts, film and theatre, and I hoped to be involved in creating beautiful products and images. ~ Maureen Chiquet