A Quote by Bobbie Ann Mason

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Quote Topics

Action Any Barney Class Couple Father Father-In-Law Few France French Frenchman Had Hiding Hiding Out Himself His Inspired Law Me Memorizing Months Off Ordeal Out Pass Spent Started Taking Until Words

Quote Author

Bobbie Ann Mason
American - Novelist
Born: May 1, 1940

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

Joanne Harris

I always say if you're going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle get a Frenchman, you know. I'm not French. And yeah, sure I could get with a dialect coach and work for six months trying to talk like a Frenchman. But there's some French actors. Just get one of them, you know.

Billy Bob Thornton

We need French chaplains and imams, French-speaking, who learn French, who love France. And who adhere to its values. And also French financing.

Manuel Valls

I consider myself a 'local' actor in France. I started out in France, I went to drama school in France and the French film community was very welcoming to me when I was a young actress.

Diane Kruger

It's true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it's a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.

Anita Loos

I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style.

Andre Leon Talley

It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.

Leila Slimani

Barney's Dad was really bad so Barney hatched a plan when his dad said "Eat your peas." Barney shouted no and ran Barney tricked his mean old dad and locked him in the cellar Barney's Mom never found out where he'd gone, Cause Barney didn't tell her. There his dad spent his life eating mice and gruel With every bite for fifty years he was sorry he'd been cruel

Bill Watterson

Because I was born in Casablanca and my parents were from the south of Spain, I do not have a big central root in France. I feel French but in a few ways, not at all French.

Jean Reno

My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.

Bobbie Ann Mason

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.

Danielle Trussoni

I just love France, I love French people, I love the French language, I love French food. I love their mentality. I just feel like it's me. I'm very French.

Olga Kurylenko

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.

Karl Marx

When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.

Claire Messud

My dad's French, and I spent my summers in France growing up. So I speak French fluently, and obviously, I speak English because I was raised in New York, and I grew up here.