Provence Quotes

• When the Good Lord begins to doubt the world, he remembers that he created Provence.

  Frederic Mistral

  Doubt, World, Remember

  46 Copy quote

• Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train.

  Elizabeth David

  Country, Next Week, Years

  Elizabeth David (1999). “French Provincial Cooking”, p.23, Penguin

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• I'd like to combine melancholy and sunshine... There's a sadness in Provence which no one has expressed... I'd like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky, like Poussin.

  Paul Cezanne

  Sadness, Sunshine, Sky

  "Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations". Book by Joachim Gasquet, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 211 in: 'What he told me - III. The Studio', 1991.

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• The air in Provence is impregnated with the aroma of garlic, which makes it very healthful to breathe.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Air, Vegetables, Aroma

  19 Copy quote

• Aioli intoxicates gently, fills the body with warmth, and the soul with
  enthusiasm. In its essence it concentrates the strength, the gaiety of
  Provence: sunshine.

  Frederic Mistral

  Sunshine, Essence, Soul

  13 Copy quote

• Paris, hours in the café, a certain spirit of rebellion, one side a bit too stubborn, the sea, the true, in Bretagne, the walking in Provence, the taste, the passion for literature, the libraries, the beautiful editions, remaking the world in a set of hours around a table and a bottle of wine. Talking without really saying nothing, just for the pleasure of talking. The museums, the theatres, the elegance, the delicacy, the heritage of the Illustration, a humanistic philosophy. The balance we got between a nordic rigor and a latin savoir-vivre, the insolence and the freedom.

  Clemence Poesy

  Beautiful, Latin, Philosophy

  21 Copy quote

• It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Autumn, Color, Up North

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.324, A&C Black

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• I realize that the memories I cherish most are not the first night successes, but of simple, everyday things: walking through our garden in the country after rain; sitting outside a cafe in Provence, drinking the vin de pays; staying at a little hotel in an English market town with Larry, in the early days after our marriage, when he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, and I was touring Scotland, so that we had to make long treks to spend weekends together.

  Vivien Leigh

  Country, Memories, Drinking

  26 Copy quote

• long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in: but Providence in kindness to us causes us to forget it. It is much the same with lying-in women. Heaven permits this forgetfulness that the world may be peopled, and that folks may take journeys to Provence.

  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne

  Travel, Kindness, Lying

  13 Copy quote

• When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.

  Arthur Koestler

  Stress, Player, Curves

  13 Copy quote

• When I walk into a market I may see a different cut of meat or an unusual vegetable and think, ‘I wonder how it would be if I took the recipe for that sauce I had in Provence and put the two together?’ So I go home and try it out. Sometimes my idea is a success and sometimes it is a flop, but that is how recipes are born. There really are not recipes, only millions of variations sparked by someone’s imagination and desire to be a little creative and different. American cooking is built, after all, on variations of old recipes from around the world.

  James Beard

  Home, Cutting, Thinking

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• When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Girl, Appreciation, Spring

  29 Copy quote

• Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.

  Honore de Balzac

  Ideas, Paris, Pet

  Honore de Balzac (2011). “Letters of Two Brides”, p.117, The Floating Press

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• Many years ago I also bought a house in Provence for about 70,000 francs. It had no electricity or running water, and no road leading to the house, but gradually we made improvements. It's my escape and I love it.

  Eric Idle

  Running, Years, Water

  "Eric Idle: 'The BBC paid us £2,000 a series for Monty Python’". Interview with Angela Wintle, www.telegraph.co.uk. January 10, 2016.

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• I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

  Tony Judt

  New York, Book, Pieces

  6 Copy quote

• My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris Smuggling bombs for the underground. And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence; He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.

  Colin Meloy

  Mother, Father, War

  54 Copy quote