Escalier Quotes

#1. I am often tongue-tied with strangers and have what the philosopher Monsieur Diderot calls l'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit: only long after a remark is made to me will my imagination supply the thing I should have said in reply.

Debra Dean

#2. ...unfortunately, I am incapable of thinking up perfectly biting, split-second retorts, in any language. The French even have a word for this: l'esprit de l'escalier; staircase wit, something you only think of on the way out.

Tania Aebi

#3. She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier] - the spirit of the staircase - for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn't think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it.

Francine Prose

#4. There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out.

Neil Gaiman

#5. Esprit de l'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom.

Martin Amis