Quotes from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“there is a French version of the story, and a true one.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in ‘normal’ French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won’t be able to understand”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“it must have been hard making a silent movie about a girl who hears voices.)”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“It was Voltaire who said that ‘in a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.’ The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be ‘Cray-see’ and Waterloo ‘Watt-air-loh’), with Agincourt (‘Ah-zan-coor’) we even get the spelling wrong.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“James II’s second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books),”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“His posturing for independence came to its logical climax when in 1966 he ordered all foreign troops out of France, arguing that in the event of war, he would not let French soldiers bow to American command as they had been forced to do in World War Two. The way de Gaulle announced his new policy has gone down in history. Apparently the Général phoned the American President, Lyndon Johnson, to tell him that France was opting out of NATO, and that consequently all American military personnel had to be removed from French soil. Taking part in the conference call was Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State, and Johnson told Rusk to reply: ‘Does that include those buried in it?”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil’s Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Tanacharison (who could relate to the cow because he claimed that the French had boiled and eaten his father),”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“The Frenchmen tried to explain that sexual intercourse between males was taboo (despite anything the Brits might have told them about French sailors),”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“But at the same time, any mention of the history of Quebec rouses burning anti-British and anti-American outrage in a French person’s heart, as if someone was talking about a favourite café of theirs that had been turned into a Starbucks. Canada”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“This is a very French trait. Today, if a big manufacturing company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s grandes écoles, someone who has studied business theory and maths for ten years but never actually been inside a factory. The important thing to the French is not experience, it is leadership – or, more exactly, French-style leadership, which mainly involves ignoring advice from anyone with lots of experience but no French grande école on their CV.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“This is of course the Prince of Wales’s motto to this day, though subsequent princes have not adopted John of Bohemia’s custom of fighting while tied up and blind.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Philippe also brought along musicians - mainly trumpeters and drummers - to scare the enemy. Even then, French music was known to terrify the English.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Verrazzano must have been turning in his grave. (Except that he didn’t have one because he’d been eaten.)”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Norman came into closer contact, and the linguistic survival techniques on both sides led to the emergence of a supple, adaptable language in which you could invent or half-borrow words and didn’t have to worry so much about whether your sentences had the right verb endings or respected certain strict rules of word order and style (as this sentence proves). The result was the earliest form of what would become English.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“In French eyes, it was of course doubly wrong to execute a beautiful woman.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from 1000 Years of Annoying the French

About the author

Popular quotes

“Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it - mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn't, of course.”
― Jon Krakauer, quote from Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

“No hables nunca de lo que no te importe, si no, oirás cosas que no te gusten.”
― quote from The Arabian Nights

“I smile at her. "You're an angel."

"Nah," she says.
"I'm just a girl crazy in love.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from I Am Number Four

“Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from The Hours

“I say there is no darkness but ignorance.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Twelfth Night

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.