Madame Genevas Quotes

I'm a maker of ballads right pretty
I write them right here in the street
You can buy them all over the city
yours for a penny a sheet
I'm a word pecker out of the printers
out of the dens of Gin Lane
I'll write up a scene on a counter
- confessions and sins in the main, boys
confessions and sins in the main

Then you'll find me in Madame Geneva's
keeping the demons at bay
There's nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they'll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day

They come rattling over the cobbles
they sit on their coffins of black
Some are struck dumb, some gabble
top-heavy on brandy or sack
The pews are all full of fine fellows
and the hawker has set up her shop
As they're turning them off at the gallows
she'll be selling right under the drop, boys
selling right under the drop

Then you'll find me in Madame Geneva's
keeping the demons at bay
There's nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they'll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day ~ Mark Knopfler

She never even told me how she felt," Valerie thought aloud, feeling the betrayal in her gut. How had she been so blind? Her sister had loved Henry silently. Did she know about the engagement? Did she overhear our parents planning? Valerie supposed it was possible, but it seemed unlikely since they were always together. Would it have broken her heart?
"Don't worry, you poor child," Madame Lazar said, seeming almost disinterested in the subject of Lucie's death. "I know you're worried about your sister, but Henry always had his eye on you. You are - were always the pretty one. ~ Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Madame Gherardi maintained that love, like most other blessings of civilisation, was a chimaera which we desire the more, the further removed we are from Nature. ~ W.G. Sebald

In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth. ~ Madame De Stael

The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man. ~ Madame De Stael

Madame d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy tale. She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its manners, its fairies, its queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious, its friendly fées. ~ Andrew Lang

If you don't get caught, you deserve everything you steal. ~ Daniel Nayeri

The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing. ~ Madame De Stael

It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it! ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

- and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu."
"Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of - "
"No, no, no!" Her voice was as high as a harpy's. "Don't go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?"
She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. "Madame, I'm not positive I follow."
"Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?"
"I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in - "
"Oh, come off it!" Madame Kagle shrilled. "People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can't begin to foresee or understand?"
"What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?"
"The pain." She glared. "The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we're afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying - the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unle ~ John Jakes

The only real grounds for attack which the expression of Armance's countenance could offer to her enemies was a singular look which she had at times when her mind was most detached. This fixed and profound gaze was one of extreme attention; there was nothing in it, certainly, that could shock the most severe delicacy; it suggested neither coquetry nor assurance; but no one could deny that it was singular, and, in that respect, out of place in a young person. Madame de Bonnivet's flatterers, when they were sure of being noticed, would sometimes imitate this look, in discussing Armance among themselves; but these vulgar spirits robbed it of an element that they had never thought of noticing. "It is with such eyes," Madame de Mali-vert said to them one day, out of patience with their malevolence, "that a pair of angels exiled among men and obliged to disguise themselves in mortal form, would gaze at one another in mutual recognition. ~ Stendhal

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification - for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery. ~ Gustave Flaubert

In the history of the human mind there has never been a useful thought or a profound truth that has not found its century and admirers. ~ Madame De Stael

[T]he clouds the miller saw as bags of flour, the draper as unironed calico, the confectioner as baked meringue, old Katina the spinster as a bridal veil and Madame Nana as an extension of her climbing rose, while Savvas admired them fulsomely as just clouds. ~ Ioanna Karystiani

In your face, E! X totally won that bet. The dark madame left the room to let X continue to bleed out. X had one other thought beyond destroying the female. Where the hell did she get those sweet shoes? ~ Marie Johnston

Most mothers think that to keep young people away from love-making it is enough never to speak of it in their presence. ~ Madame De La Fayette

Hello, Jake, I'm glad you could come," Sunny (as Madame Hoo was now called) said, shaking the hand of the chairman of the State Gambling Commission.

"Boom!" Jake Wexler replied. ~ Ellen Raskin

It is impossible to rise to freedom, from the midst of corruptions, without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease. We are in want of a terrible political fever, to carry off our foul humors. ~ Madame Roland

That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it? ~ Peter Washington

Gaiety pleases more when we are assured that it does not cover carelessness. ~ Madame De Stael

Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation. ~ Julie Orringer

If I had a lover who wanted to hear from me every day, I would break with him. ~ Madame De La Fayette

To know nothing, or little, is in the nature of some husbands. To hide, in the nature of how many women? Oh, ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners' bills? How many of you have gowns and bracelets which you daren't show, or which you wear trembling?
trembling, and coaxing with smiles the husband by your side, who does not know the new velvet gown from the old one, or the new bracelet from last year's, or has any notion that the ragged-looking yellow lace scarf cost forty guineas and that Madame Bobinot is writing dunning letters every week for the money! ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love. ~ Madame De Stael

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down. ~ George Will

Golosh Street is an interesting locality. All the oddities of trade seemed to have found their way thither and made an eccentric mercantile settlement. There is a bird-shop at one corner. Immediately opposite is an establishment where they sell nothing but ornaments made out of the tinted leaves of autumn, varnished and gummed into various forms. Further down is a second-hand book-stall. There is a small chink between two ordinary-sized houses, in which a little Frenchman makes and sells artificial eyes, specimens of which, ranged on a black velvet cushion, stare at you unwinkingly through the window as you pass, until you shudder and hurry on, thinking how awful the world would be if everyone went about without eyelids. Madame Filomel, the fortune-teller, lives at No. 12 Golosh Street, second storey front, pull the bell on the left-hand side. Next door to Madame is the shop of Herr Hippe, commonly called the Wondersmith.
("The Wondersmith") ~ Fitz-James O'Brien

It would have cost me more trouble to escape from injustice, than it does to submit to it. ~ Madame Roland

Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche. ~ Sophie Barthes

They look so tired, so hot!" everyone kept saying, but not one of them thought to open their doors, to invite one of these wretches inside, to welcome them into the shady bits of heaven that the refugees could glimpse behind the houses, where wooden benches nestled in arbours amid redcurrant bushes and roses. There were just too many of them. Too many weary, pale faces, dripping with sweat, too many wailing children, too many trembling lips asking, "Do you know where we could get a room? A bed?" … "Would you tell us where we could find a restaurant, please, Madame?" It prevented the townspeople from being charitable. There was nothing human left in this miserable mob; they were like a herd of frightened animals. Their crumpled clothes, crazed faces, hoarse voices, everything about them made them look peculiarly alike, so you couldn't tell them apart. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman ... ~ Victor Hugo

Madame Versoix had been interrupted in the middle of preparing dinner. She wore an apron and held a wooden spoon in one hand. She was younger than her husband, chubby and handsome and warm-eyed. Instinctively Bond guessed that they had no children and that they gave their thwarted affection to their friends and some regular customers, and probably to some pets. ~ Ian Fleming

The humanist, who read too much, ate too much. He quoted and burped, and these two complaints were equally repugnant to his neighbor, a self-made aristocrat, Madame Lenoir. ~ Marcel Proust

I never was able to believe in the existence of next year except as in a metaphysical notion. ~ Madame De Stael

She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world- didn't seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter- I hadn't ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach- with a good farm's care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into its leafy, broad self. Garlic seized upon its lively nature. Tomatoes tasted as substantive as beef. ~ Aimee Bender

When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue. ~ Madame De Stael

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit. ~ Alberto Manguel

The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed. ~ Madame Necker

The face of a woman, whatever be the force or extent of her mind, whatever be the importance of the object she pursues, is always an obstacle or a reason in the story of her life. ~ Madame De Stael