Stephen Clarke > Quotes

“If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be.”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“there is a French version of the story, and a true one.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in ‘normal’ French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won’t be able to understand”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“There's no room for human rights in a government waiting room.”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“It was Voltaire who said that ‘in a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.’ The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“James II’s second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books),”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“it must have been hard making a silent movie about a girl who hears voices.)”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Calling a tenth- or eleventh-century Norman a Frenchman would have been a bit like telling a Glaswegian he’s English, and we all know how dangerous that can be.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Philippe also brought along musicians - mainly trumpeters and drummers - to scare the enemy. Even then, French music was known to terrify the English.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“She was looking at me as if I was a painting too, to be examined for symbols and meaning, and she couldn't decide in the end if I really was just a mass of pointless daubs”
― Stephen Clarke, Merde Actually

“This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be ‘Cray-see’ and Waterloo ‘Watt-air-loh’), with Agincourt (‘Ah-zan-coor’) we even get the spelling wrong.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“The Frenchmen tried to explain that sexual intercourse between males was taboo (despite anything the Brits might have told them about French sailors),”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Norman came into closer contact, and the linguistic survival techniques on both sides led to the emergence of a supple, adaptable language in which you could invent or half-borrow words and didn’t have to worry so much about whether your sentences had the right verb endings or respected certain strict rules of word order and style (as this sentence proves). The result was the earliest form of what would become English.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“This is a very French trait. Today, if a big manufacturing company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s grandes écoles, someone who has studied business theory and maths for ten years but never actually been inside a factory. The important thing to the French is not experience, it is leadership – or, more exactly, French-style leadership, which mainly involves ignoring advice from anyone with lots of experience but no French grande école on their CV.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Forgetting the existence of Celts, African-Americans and many other branches of the Anglophone world, the French will blame ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ for whatever is irking them.fn8”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“His posturing for independence came to its logical climax when in 1966 he ordered all foreign troops out of France, arguing that in the event of war, he would not let French soldiers bow to American command as they had been forced to do in World War Two. The way de Gaulle announced his new policy has gone down in history. Apparently the Général phoned the American President, Lyndon Johnson, to tell him that France was opting out of NATO, and that consequently all American military personnel had to be removed from French soil. Taking part in the conference call was Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State, and Johnson told Rusk to reply: ‘Does that include those buried in it?”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Austria is a country founded on pastries, and a visit to a Viennese coffee shop makes you wonder how a nation that devotes so much energy to producing it's dizzying variety of delicious Kuchen and Torten could ever have done something so hideously uncake-like as support Hitler in 1938.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Someone who would tax them half to death but who might just keep them alive long enough to pay the taxes – a lot like modern governments, in fact.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“And to everyone at Susanna Lea’s agency for their role in making this whole histoire possible. ‘The English, by nature, always want to fight their neighbours for no reason, which is why they all die badly.’ From the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, written during the Hundred Years War”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Only the French, I thought, could attain orgasm by listening to themselves. It was self-inflicted oral sex. A DIY blowjob.”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year In The Merde: The pleasures and perils of being a Brit in France

“Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil’s Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Verrazzano must have been turning in his grave. (Except that he didn’t have one because he’d been eaten.)”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“But at the same time, any mention of the history of Quebec rouses burning anti-British and anti-American outrage in a French person’s heart, as if someone was talking about a favourite café of theirs that had been turned into a Starbucks. Canada”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“He could have had “dull” tattooed across his forehead, but that would have made him too exciting.”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“People's voices change a lot when they speak a different language.”
― Stephen Clarke

“King Edward was married to the daughter of one of the warring Anglo-Saxon earls, but he had taken a vow of chastity, and he had no direct heir.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“In short, Normandy owed its existence to an Englishman who deflected invaders away from Britain and over to France. An auspicious start.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“There is a class of tourists who never seem to see the things they're visiting, I thought. They prefer to look at directions to the next place they're not going to look at.”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“Napoleon's aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l'Empereur.”
― Stephen Clarke, How the French Won Waterloo: Or Think They Did