The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

-Gray,Thomas
  Letter to Richard West, 8  Apr. Collected in H  W Starr (ed) Correspondence of  Thomas Gray (1971).

The Frenchhad a moremartial air thanthe English.There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody campaign† They were at this singular period, without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions of legal and moral responsibility.

-Haydon, Benjamin Robert
Autobiography (published1847).

La langue fran c° aise n'est point fixe¤  e et ne se fixera point. French is not a static language and will never become static.

-Hugo,Victor Marie
  Cromwell, pre¤  face.

Greater lovethanthis,hesaid, nomanhaththat a manlay down his wife for his friend.Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail.

-Joyce,James Augustine Aloysius
  Ulysses.

   You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy† In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women.You must entirely resist both temptations, and while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King.

-Herbert, 1st Earl
  Message to the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, reported in The Times,19  Aug.

New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one- trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle. St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

-Mailer, Norman Kingsley
  Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'The Siege of Chicago'.

   A spectre is haunting Europeöthe spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holyalliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore,1888).

Oh some are fond of Spanish wine, and some are fond of French, And some'll swallow tay and stuff fit only for a wench. 559

-Masefield,John Edward
  'Captain Stratton's Fancy'.

The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like.

-Mazarin,Jules, Cardinal
Attributed by the Duchess of Orle¤  ans in a letter dated 25 Oct 1715.

The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.

-Morley, Robert
  A Musing Morley,'France and the French'.

I started off in films as a kingöa French king, admittedly, but nevertheless a king in MarieAntoinetteöand stayed in that sort of income bracket.

-Morley, Robert
Quoted in The Best of Robert Morley (1981).

  What are we learning Frenchor thepianofor,Iwould like to know, if it is not to be sold to a man some day† We have to cringe, and manoeuvre, and grimace for a husbandöa husband who may be deaf orhavea hump if he is richöa husband that may attack you in delirium tremens to-day if he makes a devout act of contrition for it to-morrow.

-O'Brien,William
  When We Were Boys.

Our fathers have, in process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.

-Quiller-Couch, SirArthurThomas known as  'Q'
  The Oxford Book of EnglishVerse, preface.

The things people had once held against her† unconventional beauty†un-American elegance, the taste for French clothes and French foodöwere suddenly no longer liabilities but assets.

-Schlesinger, Arthur M(eier),Jr
  OnJacqueline Kennedy's post-election image. AThousand Days.

As the French say, there are three sexesömen, women, and clergymen.

-Smith, Rev Sydney
Quoted in Lady Holland Memoir (1855), vol.1, ch.9.

Now hang it! quoth I, as I look'd towards the French coastöa man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad.

-Sterne, Laurence
^67  Tristram.Tristram Shandy, bk.7, ch.2.

The French are polite, but it is often mere ceremonious politeness. A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness that compels belief in their sincerity.

-Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens
  The Innocents Abroad.

We are all American at puberty; we die French.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  Diary note,18 Jul.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English speaking audiences.

-Wharton, Edith Newbold ne¤  e Jones
  TheAge of Innocence, bk.1, ch.1.

Into the face of the young man†had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

-Plum
  The Luck of the Bodkins, ch.1.