John Baxter > Quotes

“Having access to the library was all well and good, but as a collector you had to own the book.”
― John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict

“The whole point of collecting is the thrill of acquisition, which must be maximized, and maintained at all costs.”
― John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict

“Our capacity for self-delusion appears almost infinite.”
― John Baxter, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris

“Though griffe literally translates as 'claw,' Parisians have redefined it to mean 'stamp,' 'label,' or 'signature.' It describes the pattern of favorite cafes, shops, walks, meeting places, which each of us imposes on the city and which makes it uniquely 'our Paris.' A griffe is no trivial thing. As surely as a passport, it identifies one as a bona fide resident, with loves, hates, tastes, and prejudices.”
― John Baxter, Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas

“the essence of Paris is lost if seen through the double glazing of a hotel room or from the top of a tour bus. You must be on foot, with chilled hands thrust into your pockets, scarf wrapped round your throat, and thoughts of a hot café crème in your imagination. It made the difference between simply being present and being there.”
― John Baxter, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris

“Opium had artistic significance, you know. Picasso smoked. He said the scent of opium was the least stupid smell in the world, except for that of the sea.”
― John Baxter, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris

“I loved reading but I loved books almost as much. Their look, their smell, their weight enshrined, to me, the worth that others found in religion, in bricks and mortar, even in relationships. A book could be friend, lover, family, priest, but more reliable than any of these. With books, one could wall off the world. In their shelter, a calm prevailed more profound than that of the stars or the sea.”
― John Baxter, 5 Nights in Paris

“I loved reading but I loved books almost as much. Their look, their smell, their weight enshrined, to me, the worth that others found in religion, in bricks and mortar, even in relationships. A book could be friend, lover, family, priest, but more reliable than any of these. With books, one could wall off the world. In their shelter, a calm prevailed more profound than that of the stars or the sea.”
― John Baxter, Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light

“La griffe is the pattern of one’s walk around the city on a shopping day. Strictly speaking, it means “claw,” or the mark made by talons scratching a tree, but in practice it’s one’s signature, the mark that signifies ownership of a territory.”
― John Baxter, Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light

“Bowls and dishes have to be ferried to and from the table, plates filled and passed, sauce boats replenished. extra bread brought, dishes explained, recipes summarized -- not to mention arguments adjudicated, reminiscences patiently listened to, glances exchanged, eyebrows raised. . . all the choreography of a social event that no menu can possibly reflect. Every meal is a world of its own, from which we emerge, however subtly, changed.”
― John Baxter, Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas

“To the French, sin—provided it is conceived with imagination and carried off with flair—is like the dust on an old bottle of burgundy, the streaks of gray in the hair of a loved one, the gleam of long, loving use on the mahogany of an ancient cabinet. It’s evidence of endurance, of survival, of life.”
― John Baxter, Immoveable Feast

“Traditionally, Apollo and the nine goddesses known as the Muses make their home on the mountain in Greece called Parnassus. Believed to inspire creativity, they are Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), and Urania (astronomy). Exclusively deities of performance, their blessing was solicited before any play or public recitation. (There were no Muses for sculptors, painters, and architects, regarded in Attic Greece as mere workmen, too lowly for divine patronage.)

During the eighteenth century, students from the religious schools of the Latin Quarter, panting up this hill at the southern limit of Paris, may have looked back at the city spreading along the banks of the Seine and thought themselves masters of the known world. Through the haze of wine purchased from the locals, this unpromising landfill, formed from the rubble of urban expansion and fertilized by the corpses of the nameless dead, could have felt like their own Parnassus, an illusion they celebrated by reciting or improvising verse. Still then nameless, the hill first appeared on a map, the Lutetia Parisiorum vulgo of Johannes Janssonius, in 1657, which identified the track leading to its summit as the Chemin d’Enfer: the Road to Hell. The district looked doomed to remain a wasteland until, in 1667, Louis XIV chose to build an observatory there. (Charles II of England, envious, immediately commissioned his own for Greenwich.) Sometime during the next fifty years, it became officially Montparnasse, since in 1725 the city annexed it under that name. A road was laid along the ridge. Tunneling below the unstable topsoil, quarrymen mined the fine-grained limestone from which a greater Paris would be built, and where soon the Muses, though far from home, would again be heard.”
― John Baxter, Montparnasse: Paris's District of Memory and Desire

“The high tide of Montparnasse was brief, from 1920 to 1935. Since their work sold mainly outside France, expatriate writers and publishers suffered less in the stock market crash of 1929 than the restaurateurs and shopkeepers who served them, but as the Depression eroded even “old money,” exiles whose wealth had freed them to escape early to Paris became the first to leave. Those accustomed to living by their wits stayed on, at least as long as magazines and newspapers wanted news of the city. Not until the mid-1930s, amid a general feeling of “the parade’s gone by” as far as France was concerned, did they drift back to New York, London, and Madrid.”
― John Baxter, Montparnasse: Paris's District of Memory and Desire