French Literary Sayings

#1. When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

Ira Glass

#2. Between urine and filth we are born.

Saint Augustine

#3. Fancy borrows much from memory, and so looks back to the past.

Giovanni Ruffini

#4. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Victor Hugo

#5. I grew up in a literary home and majored in French, English, and sociology. They all have served me well over the years.

Gloria Gaither

#6. English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#7. People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Rachel Cusk

#8. When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron's twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star's natural life.

Sam Kean

#9. You can imagine what a trip this is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck-I get to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor at the same time.

Julia Phillips

#10. Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.

Carl Jung

#11. Men from children nothing differ.

William Shakespeare

#12. (Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)

Tom Robbins

#13. Oh man, a six pack of soda - five dollars, bag of beef jerky - six dollars, scaring the living shit out of your best friend - priceless,

Dominick Anderson

#14. When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.

Mark Twain

#15. Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.

Julian Assange

#16. as the descendants of the Normans finally amalgamated with the English natives, the Anglo-Saxon language reasserted itself; but in its poverty it had to borrow hundreds of French words (literary, intellectual, and cultural) before it could become the language of literature.

Richard A. LaFleur

#17. German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.

Pankaj Mishra