Oui, oui, Paris.
When good Americans die, they go to Paris. -Oscar Wilde
You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden. -Allen Ginsberg
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. -Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The national characteristics… the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.” -Lawrence Durrell
Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past. -Michael Simkins
A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life. -Thomas Jefferson
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. -Ernest Hemingway
America is my country and Paris is my hometown. -Gertrude Stein
The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay, I heard the laughter of her heart in every street café. -Oscar Hammerstein II
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French. -James Baldwin
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. -John Berger
People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain… or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris. -Roman Payne
Paris ain’t much of a town. -Babe Ruth
Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant. -Honoré de Balzac
You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights. I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe. -Owen Wilson as Gil in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator. -Jean Cocteau
Secrets travel fast in Paris. -Napoleon Bonaparte
Coming [to Paris] has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am. -Augustus Saint-Gaudens
I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely. -Josephine Baker
Paris… is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail. -Edmund White
The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything. -James Thurber
London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation. –Ernest Hemingway
Lise: Paris has ways of making people forget. Jerry: Paris? No, not this city. It’s too real and too beautiful. It never lets you forget anything. It reaches in and opens you wide, and you stay that way. -Leslie Caron as Lise and Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan in An American In Paris
Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs – everything is a pretext for a good dinner. -Jean Anouilh
Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half. -Charles de Montesquieu
Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D’Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train? -Margaret Anderson
When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. -Henry Miller
Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets – as vast and indestructible as nature itself. -Anne Rice
What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world! -Charles Dickens
A final reminder. Whenever you are in Paris at twilight in the early summer, return to the Seine and watch the evening sky close slowly on a last strand of daylight fading quietly, like a sigh. -Kate Simon
That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me. -Marion Cotillard as Adriana in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
I love Paris when it sizzles. -Cole Porter
For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her. -Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
Good talkers are only found in Paris. -Francois Villon
I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city… It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see. -Katherine Mansfield
In Paris, our lives are one masked ball. -Gaston Leroux
Even the pigeons are dancing, kissing, going in circles, mounting each other. Paris is the city of love, even for the birds. -Samantha Schutz
It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. -Henry Miller
There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even – the French air clears up the brain and does good – a world of good. -Vincent Willem van Gogh
Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I’d never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn’t know what. Maybe it was something I’d forgotten or something I’ve been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive. Yes, alive. That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me. -from in the final vignette of Paris Je T’Aime
The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older – intelligence and good manners. –F. Scott Fitzgerald
An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris. -Friedrich Nietzsche
She’s one of those third year girls who gripe my liver… You know, American college kids. They come over here to take their third year and lap up a little culture… They’re officious and dull. They’re always making profound observations they’ve overheard. -Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan in An American In Paris
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. -Mark Twain
To err is human. To loaf is Parisian. -Victor Hugo
I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood… I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. –Michel de Montaigne
There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once. -James Joyce
It’s Paris. You don’t come here for the weather. -Adrian Leeds
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. -Ernest Hemingway
Paris is always a good idea. -Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina
Images: Aih, Jess Wood, Bruno Candeias, Panoramas, Vincent Ros
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