|
d0f3aea
|
Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing-- turn your toes out when you walk--- And remember who you are!
|
|
humor
alice-in-wonderland
french
remember
lewis-carroll
|
Lewis Carroll |
|
9802b67
|
"He showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "celebration."
|
|
politics
chocolate-cake
connotations
word-association
chocolate
semantics
french
food
guilt
|
Michael Pollan |
|
d17cf81
|
For , literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the and , it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking . is a father's . It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It is hope and faith. But it passes over the significance of the moment; of parting it says nothing. It hides its emotion. It says too little. While ('God be with you') and say too much. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. is a prayer, a ringing cry. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. God will be with you. God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you; I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's . But says neither too much nor too little. It is a simple acceptance of fact. All understanding of life lies in its limits. All emotion, smoldering, is banked up behind it. But it says nothing. It is really the unspoken good-by, the pressure of a hand, 'Sayonara.
|
|
spanish
emotion
god
japanese
goodbyes
german
farewell
english
french
mother
father
|
Anne Morrow Lindbergh |
|
c73399a
|
He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.
|
|
men
women
love
french
|
Gustave Flaubert |
|
85955d1
|
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.
|
|
humor
englishmen
languages
french
|
P.G. Wodehouse |
|
1e621d9
|
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
|
|
stars
sand
wind
sky
french
|
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
|
3e18f6d
|
I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
|
|
time
english-language
french
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
1302770
|
"Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.
|
|
poe
endormi
rêve
french
|
Edgar Allan Poe |
|
cc2e462
|
que ferais-je sans ce monde que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions ou etre ne dure qu'un instant ou chaque instant verse dans le vide dans l'oubli d'avoir ete sans cette onde ou a la fin corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent que ferais-je sans ce silence gouffre des murmures haletant furieux vers le secours vers l'amour sans ce ciel qui s'eleve sur la poussieere de ses lests que ferais-je je ferais comme hier comme aujourd'hui regardant par mon hublot si je ne suis pas seul a errer et a virer loin de toute vie dans un espace pantin sans voix parmi les voix enfermees avec moi
|
|
poems
french
|
Samuel Beckett |
|
341f463
|
Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.
|
|
los-angeles
pulp-fiction
noir
noir-fiction
french
|
James Ellroy |
|
77298a4
|
On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down.... Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each would that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear. I took them all away, and if there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away. Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye. They ere French, they were Jews, and they were you.
|
|
the-book-thief
world-war-ii
french
jews
|
Markus Zusak |
|
b8a5b19
|
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
|
|
learning
female
english
male
french
|
Jeffrey Eugenides |
|
5ada48b
|
My lord said, amongst other things, that he did not propose to burden the doctor with the details of his genealogy. He consigned the doctor and all his works, severally and comprehensively described, to hell, and finished up his epic speech by a pungent and Rabelaisian criticism of the whole race of leeches.
|
|
dominic
leeches
doctor
french
|
Georgette Heyer |
|
953fb14
|
One of the many advantages of having a boyfriend who is half French is that his culinary repertoire extends beyond mac and cheese. Plus, there's the kissing.
|
|
french
|
Meg Cabot |
|
7966d9e
|
There is no good word for ; just as there is no good word for . is to as is to , and as is to , and as is to .
|
|
sex
organs
french
|
Nicholson Baker |
|
6cafa38
|
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
|
|
memory-trigger
metafiction
self
french
infinite
novel
memory
nostalgia
|
Marcel Proust |
|
4a0d617
|
"People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: Esprit de l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party... As you start down the stairway, then -- magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do. Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about." --
|
|
esprit-de-l-escalier
spirit-of-the-stairway
staircase
stairway
guts
french
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
|
2390eb0
|
"Irene gasped. "Have you taken leave of your senses, Stuart?" she hissed. "Have you?" Stuart closed his eyes. "No," he said. "Au contraire." It was strong language for the Edinburgh New Town, but he had to say it. "Don't au contraire me," said Irene. But it was too late. He had."
|
|
bertie
nagging
strong-language
funny
arguments
french
|
Alexander McCall Smith |
|
fc63b33
|
Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour' 'Well, it's bloody close...' 'Well, they often are....
|
|
forbidden-fruit
french
sin
|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
2c31d73
|
Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.
|
|
ben-sonnenberg
essays
french-people
grand-street-magazine
in-search-of-lost-time
john-ruskin
marcel-proust
revisionism
snobbery
terence-kilmartin
english
french
paris
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
bfc4229
|
Venerons le chien. Le chien (quel drole de bete!), a sa sueur sur sa langue et son sourire dans sa queue.
|
|
french
|
Victor Hugo |
|
a8712fd
|
Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say - no detail spared in the quest for perfection.
|
|
perfection
italians
french
|
Elizabeth Gilbert |
|
359c4a0
|
L'amour n'a point de moyen terme; ou il perd, ou il sauve.
|
|
love
french
|
Victor Hugo |
|
95dbb45
|
,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.
|
|
humor
forlorn
sorry
language
french
|
Kate Atkinson |
|
dbd5294
|
"What would you expect to find when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed?
|
|
literature
black-powder
blackness
french
protest
|
Jean-Paul Sartre |
|
f1b6af4
|
Sombres, dites-vous? Mais posez-vous la question docteur : pourquoi tous les grands philosophes sont-ils sombres? Demandez-vous qui sont les gens satisfaits, rassures et eternellement joyeux! Laissez-moi vous donner la reponse : -- la populace et les enfants!
|
|
somber
nietzsche
french
pessimism
|
Irvin D. Yalom |
|
e225f33
|
"Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages. "I hate you," she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. "I really, really hate you." Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help taking it personally."
|
|
humor
languages
french
|
David Sedaris |
|
1d1cd0f
|
"For the weekend before, we had had a blowout of tarts, a tart bender, tart madness- even, I dare say, a Tart-a-pa- , if you will forgive one final usage of the construction before we at last bury that cruelly beaten dead pop-culture horse. Tarte aux Peches, Tarte aux Limettes, Tarte aux Poires, Tarte aux Cerises. Tarte aux Fromage Frais, both with and without Pruneaux. Tarte aux Citron et aux Amandes, Tarte aux Poires a la Bourdalue, and Tarte aux Fraises, which is not "Tart with Freshes," as the name of the Tarte aux Fromage Frais ("Tart with Fresh Cheese," of course) might suggest, but rather Tart with Strawberries, which was a fine little French lesson. (Why are strawberries, in particular, named for freshness? Why not blackberries? Or say, river trout? I love playing amateur- not to say totally ignorant- etymologist....) I made two kinds of pastry in a kitchen so hot that, even with the aid of a food processor, the butter started melting before I could get it incorporated into the dough. Which work resulted in eight tart crusts, perhaps not paragons of the form, but good enough. I made eight fillings for my eight tart crusts. I creamed butter and broke eggs and beat batter until it formed "the ribbon." I poached pears and cherries and plums in red wine." --
|
|
freshness
pastries
fillings
tart
french
fruit
|
Julie Powell |
|
f8cfbb3
|
"There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall." "I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied. "That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all."
|
|
independence
judgment-day
uprising
unrest
eden
paradise-lost
morocco
innocence
french
revolution
|
Paul Bowles |
|
8c273be
|
A cheval sur une tombe et une naissance difficile. Du fond du trou, reveusement, le fossoyeur applique ses fers. On a le temps de vieillir. L'air est plein de nos cris.
|
|
difficile
godot
waiting-for-godot
samuel-beckett
naissance
french
french-literature
|
Samuel Beckett |
|
64101e7
|
"His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say "Prenez donc une des ces poires. La bonne dame d'en face m'en offre plus que je n'en peux savourer." Or: "Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dahlias, belles fleurs que j'execre."
|
|
humbert-humbert
pears
neighbors
french
|
Vladimir Nabokov |
|
98991c1
|
...human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all that you need to read somebody else's mind is the willingness to read your own.
|
|
human-thought
french
|
William Maxwell |
|
5d4d854
|
all cats have a Spanish tinge although Puss himself elegantly lubricates his virile, muscular, native Bergamasque with French, since that is the only language in which you can purr.
|
|
french-language
purring
french
|
Angela Carter |
|
52bea94
|
Je suggere que tu mettes de cote une partie des sommes que tu investis a fonds perdus dans l'industrie des boissons alcooliques.
|
|
vin
french
|
John Kennedy Toole |
|
368a4c2
|
Parce que, a sa facon de causer, on voyait bien que le gars etait alle tres longtemps a l'ecole. C'etait probablement ce qui l'avait rendu dingue.
|
|
école
french
|
John Kennedy Toole |
|
e3d0030
|
Belle laide, Athenais calls me,' I replied with a little shrug. The expression was usually used to describe a woman who was arresting despite the plainness of her looks.
|
|
common-beauty
french
|
Kate Forsyth |
|
e4a10be
|
"Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up. Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie. Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake."
|
|
desserts
fruit-flavors
pastry-chef
patisserie
tokyo
pastries
french
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
404eca4
|
Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. 'In the name of the Father,' he shouted, and a Frenchman reeled back with a pulped eye, 'and of the Son,' Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man's nose, 'and of the Holy Ghost!
|
|
quarterstaff
father-hobbe
priest
fighting
french
|
Bernard Cornwell |
|
60ad9da
|
"A depachika is like nothing else. It is the endless bounty of a hawker's bazaar, but with Japanese civility. It is Japanese food and foreign food, sweet and savory. The best depachika have more than a hundred specialized stands and cannot be understood on a single visit. I felt as though I had a handle on Life Supermarket the first time I shopped there, but I never felt entirely comfortable in a depachika. They are the food equivalent of Borges's "The Library of Babel": if it's edible, someone is probably selling it, but how do you find it? How do you resist the cakes and spices and Chinese delis and bento boxes you'll pass on the way? At the Isetan depachika, in Shinjuku, French pastry god Pierre Herme sells his signature cakes and macarons. Not to be outdone, Franco-Japanese pastry god Sadaharu Aoki sells his own nearby. Tokyo is the best place in the world to eat French pastry. The quality and selection are as good as or better than in Paris, and the snootiness factor is zero. I wandered by a collection of things on sticks: yakitori at one stand, at another. Kushiage are panko-breaded and fried foods on sticks. At any depachika, you can buy kushiage either golden and cooked, or pale and raw to fry at home. Neither option is terribly appetizing: the fried stuff is losing crispness by the second, and who wants to deep-fry in a poorly ventilated Tokyo apartment in the summer? But the overall effect of the display is mesmerizing: look at all the different foods they've put on sticks! Pork, peppers, mushrooms, squash, taro, and two dozen other little cubes."
|
|
street-food
tokyo
pastries
french
|
Matthew Amster-Burton |
|
2c4d405
|
"When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it's always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are the people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies. My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that's confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we've done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs, and little remarks such as "We saved your ass in World War II." Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are "We're number two!"
|
|
humor
usa
french
|
David Sedaris |
|
03f925f
|
My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn't care about any of it. There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pate sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it.
|
|
food-sensor
la-lyonnaise
moods
rose-edelstein
enjoyment
ingredients
emotions
french
food
|
Aimee Bender |
|
c709668
|
Jusqu'au dernier moment l'homme qui, doue d'une volonte prometheenne, veut arracher a la terre son secret sentira la griffe du doute lui dechirer le coeur.
|
|
doute
french
griffe
|
Stefan Zweig |