{"quotes":[{"text":"You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["colonialism","french","french-colonialism","french-morocco","lies","morocco","moslem","nazarene","politics","politique","sins","truth"],"id":1106,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).","author":"Charles Yang","tags":["french","grammar","language","welsh"],"id":4299,"author_id":"Charles+Yang"},{"text":"So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.","author":"Alexander McCall Smith","tags":["french","humour","mma-ramotswe"],"id":6818,"author_id":"Alexander+McCall+Smith"},{"text":"The past has given us much too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and the organization control; between the 'come one, come all' of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off and flogging the dead horse of how planting carrots is enough to leave this nightmare.","author":"The Invisible Committee","tags":["french","politics","the-power-of-choice"],"id":8089,"author_id":"The+Invisible+Committee"},{"text":"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.","author":"P.G. Wodehouse","tags":["french","grey-hair","guillotine","humor","old-age"],"id":12193,"author_id":"P.G.+Wodehouse"},{"text":"I did not want to be taken for a fool – the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.","author":"Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly","tags":["foolishness","french","remorse","respect"],"id":17513,"author_id":"Jules+Barbey+d%27Aurevilly"},{"text":"An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - 'Why are you sad?'I'm not sad,' I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.'You should not be sad,' he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. 'It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later.' The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. 'It is criminal, the love,' he said, patting my shoulder. 'But none is worse.","author":"Margaret Atwood","tags":["french","love","sadness"],"id":22058,"author_id":"Margaret+Atwood"},{"text":"I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction.","author":"Stéphane Mallarmé","tags":["french","literature"],"id":25564,"author_id":"St%C3%A9phane+Mallarm%C3%A9"},{"text":"Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.","author":"Antonin Artaud","tags":["artaud","essay","french","inspiration","inspirational","poetry","theater","theatre","writting"],"id":28551,"author_id":"Antonin+Artaud"},{"text":"He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.","author":"Katherine Rundell","tags":["birds","cats","english","french","horseback-riding","horses","humor","humorous","introductions","latin","reading","reading-books","reading-books-humor"],"id":32032,"author_id":"Katherine+Rundell"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":124,"pages":13,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}