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

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Popular quotes

“Melinda Pratt rides city bus number twelve to her cello lesson, wearing her mother's jean jacket and only one sock. Hallo, world, says Minna. Minna often addresses the world, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud. Bus number twelve is her favorite place for watching, inside and out. The bus passes cars and bicycles and people walking dogs. It passes store windows, and every so often Minna sees her face reflection, two dark eyes in a face as pale as a winter dawn. There are fourteen people on the bus today. Minna stands up to count them. She likes to count people, telephone poles, hats, umbrellas, and, lately, earrings. One girl, sitting directly in front of Minna, has seven earrings, five in one ear. She has wisps of dyed green hair that lie like forsythia buds against her neck.

There are, Minna knows, a king, a past president of the United States, and a beauty queen on the bus. Minna can tell by looking. The king yawns and scratches his ear with his little finger. Scratches, not picks. The beauty queen sleeps, her mouth open, her hair the color of tomatoes not yet ripe. The past preside of the United States reads Teen Love and Body Builder's Annual.

Next to Minna, leaning against the seat, is her cello in its zippered canvas case. Next to her cello is her younger brother, McGrew, who is humming. McGrew always hums. Sometimes he hums sentences, though most often it comes out like singing. McGrew's teachers do not enjoy McGrew answering questions in hums or song. Neither does the school principal, Mr. Ripley. McGrew spends lots of time sitting on the bench outside Mr. Ripley's office, humming.

Today McGrew is humming the newspaper. First the headlines, then the sports section, then the comics. McGrew only laughs at the headlines.

Minna smiles at her brother. He is small and stocky and compact like a suitcase. Minna loves him. McGrew always tells the truth, even when he shouldn't. He is kind. And he lends Minna money from the coffee jar he keeps beneath his mattress.

Minna looks out the bus window and thinks about her life. Her one life. She likes artichokes and blue fingernail polish and Mozart played too fast. She loves baseball, and the month of March because no one else much likes March, and every shade of brown she has ever seen. But this is only one life. Someday, she knows, she will have another life. A better one. McGrew knows this, too. McGrew is ten years old. He knows nearly everything. He knows, for instance, that his older sister, Minna Pratt, age eleven, is sitting patiently next to her cello waiting to be a woman.”
― Patricia MacLachlan, quote from The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt

“If I didn’t have a job, I might have stayed in bed until I rotted.”
― Claire Cook, quote from Must Love Dogs

“I know this feeling. It's a familiar one. The feeling of knowing that everything has changed, and you have to keep going, but you don't know what to do.”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin

“He was watching her, leaning back in the chair with his arms crossed. His face was serious and kind; she saw he wasn’t making fun. He spoke softly, his head bent forward with concern. “A woman should learn to take a compliment gracefully,” he said.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from Amy and Isabelle

“Love's empire is this globe and all mankind; the most refined and the most degraded, the cleverest and the most stupid, are all liable to become his faithful subjects. He can alike command the devotion of an archbishop and a South-Sea Islander, of the most immaculate maiden lady (whatever her age) and of the savage Zulu girl. From the pole to the equator, and from the equator to the further pole, there is no monarch like Love.”
― H. Rider Haggard, quote from Dawn

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