French Poetry Quotes

#1. The sign of a true woman isn't the ability to recite French poetry or play the pianoforte or cook Chateaubriand. The sign of a true woman is learning to listen to her own voice even when society does its best to drown it out.

Eve Marie Mont

#2. I hate French poetry. What measured glitter!

Israel Zangwill

#3. When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#4. Let's be honest - Bill Murray was onto something when he laughed at Andie MacDowell's degree in 19th century French poetry in 'Groundhog Day'

Marco Rubio

#5. I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Paul Auster

#6. I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

Paul Auster

#7. {...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.

Andrea Bouchaud

#8. Simply pushing harder within the old boundaries will not do.

Karl E. Weick

#9. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

Amy Tan

#10. I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

Helen Vendler

#11. I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.

W.C. Fields

#12. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.

Bertrand Russell

#13. Where your attention goes, your life goes.

Martha Beck

#14. Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

Simone De Beauvoir

#15. Gertrude was a veteran of the love wars.

Jerry Pinto

#16. Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Charles Baudelaire

#17. No one's serious at seventeen,
When lindens line the promenades

Arthur Rimbaud

#18. 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

#19. You mistake purpose for cruelty, and I have always had a purpose. I am not mindless.

Anthony Ryan

#20. In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

Fanny Howe

#21. I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.

Sally Kirkland

#22. I am loath to call clemency what was, rather, the exhaustion of cruelty.

Seneca.

#23. The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

Thomas Gray

#24. Homosexuality is anti-humanity.

Yahya Jammeh

#25. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

Robert Morgan

#26. Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

Maurice Druon

#27. People either make things or they don't. Inspiration is a poster.

Merlin Mann

#28. I wanted to work with people from the world, with different minds and different visions.

Juliette Binoche

#29. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.

Karl French

#30. Read it to me."
"Seriously?" he said quietly. "You want me to read you poetry? Like saving your life ten times wasn't enough?

Brynn Kelly

#31. Why do the men come, do you suppose?" asked Fiver. "Who knows why men do anything? They may drive cows or sheep in the fields, or cut wood in the copses. What does it matter? I'd rather dodge a man than a stoat or a fox.

Richard Adams

#32. In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.

Garth Risk Hallberg