Old French Quotes

#1. Screenwriting is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.

James L. Brooks

#2. soothing: re-press of an old French recording of Ida Presti, possibly the greatest guitarist who ever lived, and her husband Alexandre Lagoya, pairing on Debussy's "Clair de Lune.

Jonathan Kellerman

#3. Diana wore a men's bowler with the intials H. W. S. sewn into the lining and an old French army coat.

Anna Godbersen

#4. Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Gilbert Highet

#5. Tracy: Stop eating people's old french fries, little pigeon. Have some self-respect. Don't you know you can fly?

Tina Fey

#6. It doesn't take money to have style, it just takes a really good eye. Sometimes you can find amazing culinary antiques that will make it feel like an old French kitchen.

Tyler Florence

#7. The word "preacher" comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

Marilynne Robinson

#8. According to an old French motto, Noblesse oblige - one must live up to one's name. The Rothschilds' condition of life has imposed on them a second motto: Richesse oblige - one must live up to one's fortune.

Guy De Rothschild

#9. As the old French proverb warns: He who fears to suffer suffers from fear.

Debra Ollivier

#10. My question was:How did I go from merely seeing the dirty French Santa in a bar to being in his hotel room the next morning? And this presented me with an actual equation. How did one plus one equal old French Santa?

Augusten Burroughs

#11. Harlequin, probably derived from the old French Hellequin: a troop of the devil's horsemen.

Bernard Cornwell

#12. I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine.

David Mitchell

#13. Unicorn. Old French, unicorne. Latin, unicornis. Literally, one-horned: unus, one and cornu,a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn.

Peter S. Beagle

#14. There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

P.G. Wodehouse

#15. He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.

Katherine Rundell

#16. The French under the old monarchy held it for a maxim that the king could do no wrong . The Americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority ... If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#17. The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk.

Stephen Clarke

#18. Green tea?"
"You can't be serious."
The old woman nodded her approval. "I wasn't."
"Because you know when a cow chews grass? And he or she chews and chews and chews? Well, green tea tastes like French-kissing that cow after it's done chewing all that grass.

David Levithan

#19. My experience of coming out was very much centered around the bar scene. And what happened for me is that when I turned 18 and was old enough to get into certain gay bars in the French Quarter, I became a regular customer.

Christopher Rice

#20. In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.

Marcel Duchamp

#21. Jean-Louis had never had a day's illness in his life. He was tall and as gnarled as an oak. The sun had baked his skin until it had the colour and toughness and stillness of a tree. With advancing years, he had lost his tongue. He now never spoke, considering such an activity pointless.

Emile Zola

#22. First things first: Marie Antoinette never said, 'Let them eat cake.' Those words were attributed to an earlier French Queen, Marie-Therese, the wife of the Sun King Louis XIV. By 1767---a year in which Marie Antoinette was still an innocent German-speaking twelve-year-old in Austria....

Kris Waldherr

#23. The last time I'd spoken French I was twelve years old; before I reached my thirteenth birthday the teacher had correctly steered me into woodwork classes.

Craig Briggs

#24. An old sergeant said, if you want to get to France in a hurry, then join the ambulance service, the French are big for ambulance service.

Frank Buckles

#25. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

Geraldine Brooks

#26. How's Alison getting on?'

Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.

Tana French

#27. A kid just couldn't see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

Tim Powers

#28. In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.

Rory Stewart

#29. Webster said, 'Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.

Peter Matthiessen

#30. I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.

Tana French

#31. Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.

Joseph Bottum

#32. After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.

Gore Vidal

#33. Tous mes anciens amours vont me revenir.'
- All my old loves will be returned to me

Carolyn Turgeon

#34. Dariya and I used to play French Revolution when we were little. We'd take turns being Marie Antoinette. Our grandmamma caught us once and had us whipped for revolutionary sentiments. We were six years old at the time and had no idea even what revolutionary sentiments were.

Robin Bridges

#35. The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.'

Thomas Sowell

#36. I met a Shanghai photographer who finds these old streets and matches the French names to what they are today. I was able to find my grandfather's block, and just walking the same streets and finding his house was deeply moving. I finally felt connected to China.

Kevin Kwan

#37. Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.

Jennifer Donnelly

#38. In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: "I'll slaughter you!" "First," says the deputy, "have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.

Hilary Mantel

#39. These three movements were born spontaneously and independently of the initiative of a few French patriots who had a place in the old political groups and parties.

Jean Moulin

#40. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

Orson Scott Card

#41. Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say 'What else can you expect?' and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.

M.M. Kaye

#42. Quebec City is the most European of any city in North America; they speak French all the time. There is a part of town called Old Quebec which is really like being in France. The architecture is just gorgeous, food, shopping. I'd say Quebec City is the most beautiful city in North America I've seen.

Sebastian Bach

#43. I was really into old musicals. When I was seven or eight, my mum and dad would be like, 'How does she know who Ginger Rogers is?' Then, one weekend, Josephine Baker popped up in a French film called 'Zouzou,' and I was so stunned because she looked like me.

Cush Jumbo

#44. I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone's (he's French but it's an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory.

Regina Spektor

#45. I'm trying to picture you growing up with sisters."
"I can do a double French braid in less than three minutes and I've bought more tampons than a thirty-one-year-old man should ever admit to.

Avery Flynn

#46. She might not do it tonight, and she might not do it with that French boy, but she was going to get laid, and soon, because she was forty-three years old and she damn well needed it.

Victoria Dahl

#47. She wakes up all at once, all over, smooth as a cat. Probably there's cat in her ancestry someplace. Those old noble French families ... " "No telling, with the French. Inventive people.

Joanna Bourne

#48. With him big Phil from Notting Hill an old "face" from the sixties a pin up gangster with a "mars bar" weal scraping his left cheek and of course two "wag" slags in tow trussed up like French Poodles with "Bratz babe" stares and Gucci Handbags

Saira Viola

#49. A two-week-old ceasefire in the Central African Republic collapsed, as conflict resumed between fighters tied to Muslim and Christian militias. French troops trying to hold the ring were attacked.

Anonymous

#50. French Yemeni relations are strong and good, they are relations depending on friendship and cooperation; my relationship with the president Chiraq are old and real.

Ali Abdullah Saleh

#51. Ask Robespierre. Ask the man with the conscience which is more important, your friend or your country - ask him how he weighs an individual in the scheme of things. Ask him which comes first, his old pals or his new principles. You ask him, Camille.

Hilary Mantel

#52. No, I'm not a French designer either. I'm from nowhere. I'm a European, old European is all I am.

Karl Lagerfeld

#53. Who hasn't made mistakes? I once french kissed a dog at a party to try to impress what turned out to be a very tall 12 year old.

LIZ

#54. When I was 14 years old, I was with my parents at a restaurant. Some people came in and said, 'Would you like to be a model?' I went to see them, and they said, 'You have to lose seven kilos.' I said, 'No, I want to eat French fries.'

Nora Arnezeder

#55. I like eggs. My favorite way of cooking eggs is old school French.

David Chang

#56. Old St Petersburg remains a beautiful stage set but to the Russians it is not what Rome is to the Italians or Paris to the French. The decisions are made in the Kremlin. The city of Peter remains a museum, open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

Joseph Wechsberg

#57. The morning sun in New Orleans felt like it was trying to make a point, convincing the old world to believe something new.

Hunter Murphy

#58. I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty.

Gillian Armstrong

#59. Rich women are not too put upon by their children. You don't have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school.

Clare Boothe Luce

#60. I wished I could read in their shrivelled faces and watery eyes, I wished I could hear in the bad French which came half through their pinched lips and half through their pointed noses, how the old ladies had got at least on to good terms with the uncanny beings which haunted the castle.

E.T.A. Hoffmann