French Word For Quotes

#1. There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. What is the French word for rain? Le rain? La rain? Is the rain masculine or feminine? It's such a bother that it must be masculine.

Libba Bray

#3. I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

Lawrence Block

#4. Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

Julian Barnes

#5. The French word for wanderlust or wandering is 'errance.' The etymology is the same as 'error.' So to wander is to make mistakes. In other words, to make mistakes, to make errors is sort of the idea of learning through trial and error, allowing the mistakes to be part of the process.

Robyn Davidson

#6. The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.

George H. W. Bush

#7. The word "journal" has in its root the word jour, French for day. A journey was the distance that could be traveled in a day. A journal, therefore, consisted of the writing one recorded per day.

Sheila Bender

#8. 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

#9. The thing that's wrong with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur

George W. Bush

#10. George W. Bush, the former US president, is reputed to have complained that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneurship in their language.

Ha-Joon Chang

#11. Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

Alan Perlis

#12. I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

Golda Meir

#13. Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.

Steve Martin

#14. My parents were lenient. My mother believed God was another word for nature. I took up Satanism not out of desperation, but out of logic. I rebelled, not but because of a religious or repressive childhood. I wanted to join the French Foreign Legion.

Anton Szandor LaVey

#15. The word "buccaneer" originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.

Tom Reiss

#16. There is no word in English for chic. Why should there be? Everything chic is by legend French. Perhaps everything chic is in reality French.

Elizabeth Hawes

#17. I have always been uncomfortable with a series of movies. I hate that word 'franchise' - it always makes me think of French fries. What I felt each time was that we were going for broke, that this was going to be the last in the series. You can't count on anything.

Sigourney Weaver

#18. Even after all these years, she still said the word "gig" self-consciously, in the same way that she always said "croissant" with the proper French pronunciation, but with an apologetic, self-deprecating look to make up for her pretentiousness.

Liane Moriarty

#19. Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.

Jules Verne

#20. He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

Colin Cotterill

#21. Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.

Monique Roffey

#22. We found many difficulties to combat, for it is not an easy thing to go into France and learn to talk French well; but at the same time, if a man sets to work in good earnest, he can do it. I have scratched the word "can't" out of my vocabulary long since, and I have not got it in my French one.

John Taylor

#23. There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.

Nicholson Baker

#24. ...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

#25. The smell of perfume left behind. There's not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word: sillage.

John Green

#26. The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'.

Gemma Burgess

#27. I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word 'home' has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it's that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.

Marjane Satrapi

#28. At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Emil Cioran

#29. Because he's just so, so," Peter paused looking for the right word, "so French!

Jack Lewis Baillot

#30. Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'.

Christopher Lee