Status Updates From Paris (Penguin Modern Class...

"What soothing melancholy is poured into the stroller's heart by the flight of the stone steps inviting him down to the banks of the Seine to loaf there, lost in contemplation of its dark waters! It is a good place, the lower embankment, to take your dreams for a walk. ... As he climbs back up the steps, it is with the feeling that he has laid in a store of memories and is richer by a fresh sadness."

"As a result, there appears to linger, in some of those circular stairwells, a residue of the dreams that they have shattered, a memory of the meditations in which love, lust and world-weariness fought for the hearts of all the nameless people who ever passed that way"

I don't believe I'd be this fond of this book had I not known the war in the home city myself. How does he do it, keep on loving this city even when the phantom of the war hunts the memories of your beloved city? It inadvertently taints all those good memories, the violence streaks the radiance of those days.
"The entire cathedral has been shouting a terrible warning to us all, which we could not hear."

"We all sense at some point the most exquisite smell in the world, at once the freshest and the most immemorial, the most mysterious and the most innocent, the closest to the origins of our plant and the most recent, the smell that moves the heart of a man to the greatest sadness and the greatest gladdness, the odour of damp earth." what a way to capture this all-familiar smell of rain of a summer day?

"A secret city" is one of the most stunning chapters of a literary fiction that I have ever read

p15 Sitting in the lap of the model you intend to paint has never seemed to me to be the ideal position. Step back even a pace and you gain by it. I find it hard to write anything about Paris while I am there: I have to get up and go away. From here, in CPH, I see it very clearly.
p27 Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later. (This is a book about war and longing for home)

There is so much of this book that I want to underline.

"Shout, shout for no reason, for the pleasure of being alive. ... I'll not go chasing after you, little ghost from 1908. Too much has changed for the worse in our city to let me smile at you as cheerfully as I would like"

In the silence of our home on a peaceful January evening, on the first day of the winter holiday that I was finally left alone, I was drifting down the street of Julian Green's Paris.

Just random thoughts I had about la vie as I am reading this book, because my mind wanders: the house is so silent that the absence of the clock in our home is striking, and also so telling of our family disposition.