Top 39 Quotes About Literature In French
#1. I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
Lev Grossman
#2. ...After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.
Pierre Louis
#3. A rich man's soup - and all from a few stones. It seemed like magic!
Marcia Brown
#4. Whoever wishes to rise above the common level must be prepared for a great struggle and recoil before no obstacle. A great writer is just simply a martyr whom the stake cannot kill.
Honore De Balzac
#5. Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre
#6. You may hold as many (literature) degrees as your hands (and pockets) may take, but if you have NOT read the book 'Le Grand Voyage' by Jorge Semprun, preferably in French (Yes we can! and I can't speak that language) then you ain't seen nothing yet...
Itzik Sivosh
#7. Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one he never uses against himself.
Honore De Balzac
#8. Nobody knew me at Buckton. Clem had chosen the town because of that; and besides, even if I had wimp out, there was not enough gas to help me going further north. - I spit on your graves ,
Boris Vian
#9. Candide listened attentively and believed innocently; for he thought Miss Cunegonde extremely beautiful, though he never had the courage to tell her so.
Voltaire
#10. In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.
Jose Bergamin
#11. I like a lot of French literature, everything that was published like in the 40s and 50s. I like a lot of that.
Robert Pattinson
#12. Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.
Joseph Bottum
#13. Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat.
Abdellah Taia
#14. Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.
Charles Baudelaire
#15. 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
#16. No one's serious at seventeen,
When lindens line the promenades
Arthur Rimbaud
#17. Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?
John Leonard
#18. In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.
Patrick White
#20. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.
Fran Lebowitz
#21. I read world literature and I read French romances in the originals. I had quite a profound knowledge - no, that sounds conceited, but I did have a profound interest in everything spiritual.
Baldur Von Schirach
#22. 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
#23. It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor.
Julia Child
#24. 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
#25. The French have a different take on photography than Americans do. They consider photography to be absolutely parallel to literature. That often makes for a deeper perception of the work.
Ralph Gibson
#26. How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.
Lytton Strachey
#27. He asked himself ... whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.
Victor Hugo
#28. 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
#29. The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
#30. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.
Abdourahman A. Waberi
#31. 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
#32. The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.
Margaret Atwood
#33. The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own.
Lytton Strachey
#34. When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.
Lev Grossman
#36. The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.
Mark Zero
#37. As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.
Sefi Atta
#38. When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.
J.M.G. Le Clezio
#39. What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably ... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
W. Somerset Maugham
