French People Quotes

“What everyone agreed was not very nice, was the way Clémence had carried on. Obviously, she wasn't the kind of girl you'd ask again: she'd ended up showing off everything she'd got, and she'd puked all down one of the muslin curtains and completely ruined it. At least the men did go into the street to do it; Lorilleux and Poisson, when they felt queer, managed to dash as far as the pork-butcher's shop. Breeding always tells.”
― Zola, Eacute;mile

“They have a saying, the French, that no woman, can be truly beautiful who is not also sometimes truly ugly.”
― Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett, Part 2

“Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“The day when a Frenchman switches from the formality of vous to the familiarity of tu is a day to be taken seriously. It is an unmistakable signal that he has decided - after weeks or months or sometimes years - that he likes you. It would be chulish and unfriendly of you not to return the compliment. And so, just when you are at last feeling comfortable with vous and all the plurals that go with it, you are thrust headlong in to the singular world of tu.”
― Peter Mayle, Toujours Provence

“The French are like a coin with a different face on either side of it (every coin has two faces), for every action there is an equally strong opposing idea that vibrates on the other end within them like the receiving side of a series of ripples in a pond. But this is all happening within themselves. The French are exactly like their own language: there are too many letters but then you're not supposed to pronounce them!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“... far be it from a French man to interfere with love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.”
― Nick Yapp, The Xenophobe's Guide to the French

“I was supposed to stay for 3 months. But I think I always knew I would stay a little longer, despite the crazy Frenchies. Or maybe because of them.”
― Vicki Lesage, Confessions of a Paris Party Girl

“JJ informed me, when he dropped them off, that they are French bulldogs, which has led med to reassess my opinion of the French. They may know a lot about making wine and fries, but they don't know jacques-merde about making dogs.”
― Melissa DeCarlo, The Art of Crash Landing

“The French doctor - the French, they are a very logical race and make good doctors - says: "M'sieu, they have all been on the wrong track - ("Jane Brown's Body")”
― Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“- Neuf heures et demie ! Non merci. Les plus beaux pectoraux de la Terre ne me feront pas lever aux aurores comme Danette.
- Pourquoi pas ?
- Je suis une femme moderne et éduquée. Je ne peux quand même pas m'adonner au culte de l'homme objet.”
― Suzanne Marty, La rousse qui croyait au père Noël

“The French like anyone with money and power. - Mikhail Abramov”
― Daniel Silva, Moscow Rules

“I came from a place where everyone was friendly, where even funeral directors told you to have a nice day as you left to bury your grandmother – but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was [rude]. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter.
‘No, no,’ you would say, hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.’
The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Les gens de qualité savent tout, sans avoir jamais rien appris.

People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.”
― Molière, Les Précieuses Ridicules

“Men have only a certain amount of energy ... one can make war - a time-honored tradition, but we'll waive that, of course. One can make love. Or one can run about the block, hit balls over nets, pump heavy weights up and down in a gym. Americans like to do these things. The French much less. That's why we're better lovers.”
― Michelle Granas, Amadea: One Spring in France

“Francuzi są eleganccy i rycerscy, istni Polacy Zachodu.”
― Jaroslav Hašek, O Podhalu, Galicji i... Piłsudskim. Szkice nieznane

“French people fucking love Harlem for some reason.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo