Lisa Anselmo > Quotes

“Nostalgia is in my blood. My mother was a passionate teacher of history and a lover of all things "was." I, too, prefer the bygone, and I'm prone to waxing wistful over the end of something even as I'm living it--cherishing, hanging on.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Perhaps we were a bit de trop—too much—for the neighborhood, but this was the wedding of the year after all.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Youpi!”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“For the first time in my life I had taken responsibility for my own happiness.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Ma used to say when I was a kid that I loved my dolls more than I loved her, but of course, the dolls were easy to love; I could control them, how they treated me.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“A wine merchant is called the caviste, and there is one just at the end of my street.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“les congés,”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“pain de mie”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“I’d gone way out there, farther than I’d ever been, and it was all uncharted from here. There was no little man I could walk around a map to help me with my life now. This was why the endless days made me anxious, why I had to make schedules. I needed order, something concrete to latch on to in the vast unknown. I”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“They’d never patched these up, never smoothed them over. Perhaps to remember that when you cut yourself free from what’s holding you back, it’s not without violence and pain.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Being your fullest self, putting yourself out into the world with arms and eyes wide—that’s the greatness I’m talking about. Knowing you deserve to be happy. My”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Every menu seems to be meat with a side of meat on a bed of meat.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Coulée Verte,”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“It was time to stop waiting to live, and to just live. To liberate myself from perfection and put myself out there—flaws, pain, and all. PART 4 Coming Home”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“They made an eggy brioche loaf called mouna, with a hint of orange flower water in the dough and a sweet, crunchy coating of pearl sugar on top. Toasted and buttered for breakfast—there was no better way to start a day than with that chewy, comforting mouthful.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“say “She lived a good, long life” was an insult to her, and to her children—a pat dismissal of the magnitude of our grief.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“cocktail dinatoire”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“All your life, they encourage you to dream big. “Reach for the stars,” they tell children. But no one ever said anything about how you’d feel after the dream became real. You grew up thinking that once you were living the dream, all your problems would be solved. You’d be magically transformed into an untouchable, celestial being living happily ever after.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“I told myself I wouldn’t need courage; I would just need to choose to be happy and then do whatever it took to stay that way. I could do that. Right?”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Quel putain de bordel de merde is one of those untranslatable French expressions that, once you get the hang of it, you really grow to appreciate—the perfect proportion of vulgarity, emotion, and poetry that only the French can achieve.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Like my bedroom as a kid, it was the one place where I felt free to create the life I wanted for myself.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“One of my friends at work called these events “LFTs,” or “Look-Forward-Tos.” Everyone needed them, she said: something fun in the future to plan for, especially when you’re going through a rough patch.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“It was from Ambrose Redmoon: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Bouillon Chartier, in the 9th arrondissement, has been in business since 1896. If Fabien hadn’t taken me there, I wouldn’t have known it existed.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Patrick took my wineglass, dumped out what was left, and refilled it with ratafia. It was a little deeper in color than the wine. He said this batch was made with something called “coing.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“un mètre!”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Art Nouveau palaces such as Bofinger and La Fermette Marbeuf, dripping in gold molding and often with elaborate murals and stained-glass skylights.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“It became a tradition to bookend my stays with parties: the welcome home party and the leaving party, or fête de vidange, as we called it, a play on the expression for grape harvest, fête de vendange—where we’d empty, or vider, my refrigerator before I’d close up the apartment and return to New York.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Instead, you’re still you, lugging around all the same crap—the same fears, the same self-doubt. A black-and-white Dorothy in a Technicolor Oz.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home

“Life had to be experienced in full, or you missed out.”
― Lisa Anselmo, My (Part-Time) Paris Life: How Running Away Brought Me Home