French Polishing Quotes

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Where in the bloody hell did that come from?" asks the other person behind the counter. Or more precisely, on top of the counter, where her ridiculously attractive, English-accented boyfriend is perched. He's the other thing I like about Anna. Wherever she goes, he follows. He nods toward the baby wipe. "What else are you carrying in your pockets? Dust rags? Furniture polish?" "Watch it," she says. "Or I'll scrub your arms, Étienne." He grins. "As long as you do it in private.
Stephanie Perkins (Lola and the Boy Next Door (Anna and the French Kiss, #2))
I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better--Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos--so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
Just imagine! In the early nineteenth century, this cathedral was in such a state of disrepair that the city considered tearing it down. Luckily for us, Victor Hugo heard about the plans to destroy it and wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to raise awareness of its glorious history. And, by golly, did it work! Parisians campaigned to save it, and the building was repaired and polished to the pristine state you find today.
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb.
Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom)
I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room. I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better-- Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos--so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always a greensward of fine spiked grass in which hornets and snakes play a great part. I remember days long back when Stanley would invite me to visit his relatives; he used to make me carry a roll of music because he wanted to show me off to these rich relatives. I remember this atmosphere well because in the presence of these smooth−tongued, overly polite, pretentious and thoroughly false Poles I always felt miserably uncomfortable. But when they spoke to one another, sometimes in French, sometimes in Polish, I sat back and watched them fascinatedly. They made strange Polish grimaces, altogether unlike our relatives who were stupid barbarians at bottom. The Poles were like standing snakes fitted up with collars of hornets. I never knew what they were talking about but it always seemed to me as if they were politely assassinating some one. They were all fitted up with sabres and broad−swords which they held in their teeth or brandished fiercely in a thundering charge. They never swerved from the path but rode rough−shod over women and children, spiking them with long pikes beribboned with blood−red pennants. All this, of course, in the drawing−room over a glass of strong tea, the men in butter−colored gloves, the women dangling their silly lorgnettes. The women were always ravishingly beautiful, the blonde houri type garnered centuries ago during the Crusades. They hissed their long polychromatic words through tiny, sensual mouths whose lips were soft as geraniums. These furious sorties with adders and rose petals made an intoxicating sort of music, a steel−stringed zithery slipper−gibber which could also register anomalous sounds like sobs and falling jets of water.
Henry Miller (Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1))
To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: HAPPY CHRISTMAS Have you gotten used to the time difference? Bloody hell,I can't sleep. I'd call,but I don't know if you're awake or doing the family thing or what. The bay fog is so thick that I can't see out my window.But if I could, I am quite certain I'd discover that I'm the only person alive in San Francisco. To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: I forgot to tell you. Yesterday I saw a guy wearing an Atlanta Film Festival shirt at the hospital.I asked if he knew you,but he didn't.I also met an enormous,hair man in a cheeky Mrs. Claus getup. he was handing out gifts to the cancer patients.Mum took the attached picture. Do I always look so startled? To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: Are you awake yet? Wake up.Wake up wake up wake up. To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: re: Are you awake yet? I'm awake! Seany started jumping on my bed,like,three hours ago. We've been opening presents and eating sugar cookies for breakfast. Dad gave me a gold ring shaped like a heart. "For Daddy's sweetheart," he said. As if I'm the type of girl who'd wear a heart-shaped ring. FROM HER FATHER. He gave Seany tons of Star Wars stuff and a rock polishing kit,and I'd much rather have those.I can't beleive Mom invited him here for Christmas. She says it's because their divorce is amicable (um,no) and Seany and I need a father figure in our lives,but all they ever do is fight.This morning it was about my hair.Dad wants me to dye it back, because he thinks I look like a "common prostitute," and Mom wants to re-bleach it.Like either of them has a say. Oops,gotta run.My grandparents just arrived,and Granddad is bellowing for his bonnie lass.That would be me. P.S. Love the picture.Mrs. Claus is totally checking out your butt. And it's Merry Christmas, weirdo. To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: HAHAHA@ Was it a PROMISE RING? Did your father give you a PROMISE RING? To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: Re: HAHAHA! I am so not responding to that.
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down.... Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each would that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear. I took them all away, and if there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away. Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye. They ere French, they were Jews, and they were you.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
We have more English Bibles than there are English-speaking people in the entire country.” Matron had turned from the window and followed his gaze. “Polish Bibles, Czech Bibles, Italian Bibles, French Bibles, Swedish Bibles. I think some are from your Sunday-school children. We need medicine and food. But we get Bibles.” Matron smiled. “I always wondered if the good people who send us Bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone)
She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.
Neal Stephenson (The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World)
In the castle of Benwick, the French boy was looking at his face in the polished surface of a kettle-hat. It flashed in the sunlight with the stubborn gleam of metal. It was practically the same as the steel helmet which soldiers still wear, and it did not make a good mirror, but it was the best he could get. He turned the hat in various directions, hoping to get an average idea of his face from the different distoritons which the bulges made. He was trying to find out what he was, and he was afraid of what he would find. The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life--even when he was a great man with the world at his feet--he was to feel this gap: something at the bototm of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.
T.H. White
White, is not a race, it is a color, European, is not a race, it is a place named after the goddess Europa. Caucasian, is not a race, it is a place and mountain range. Gentile, is not a race, it is a biblical name that was given to describe Aryans as non-Jews. Aryan is the biological correct name of our race! Aryan is who we are by blood and the genetic source of our being and beginning. All the numerous names, German, French, Irish, Scotch, Polish, Italian, Norwegian and on and on are simply the many tribal names of the Aryan people.
Ron McVan (Way of the Druid)
Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from.
Nicola Griffith (The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen #1))
Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.
Timothy Snyder
When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/​biology/​French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/​biology/​French, and I’m good at this, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.
Claire Messud (The Woman Upstairs)
The word “fractal” was coined in 1975 by the Polish/French/American mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot (b. 1924), to describe shapes which are detailed at all scales.
Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (Introducing Fractals: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides))
In the dining room, the tulips had started hanging their heads over the rim of their vase as if they were admiring their own reflections in the polished tabletop.
Anne Tyler (French Braid)
All languages that derive fromLatin form the word 'compassion' by combining the prefix meaning 'with' (com-) and the root meaning 'suffering' (Late Latin, passio). In other languages- Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance- this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefixcombined with the word that means 'feeling' (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wsspół-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, medkänsla). In languages that derive from Latin, 'compassion' means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, 'pity' (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. 'To take pity on a woman' means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word 'compassion' generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion- joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, 'Throw me out!' But instead of throwing her out, he seized her and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.
Milan Kundera
This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.
Amos Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness)
Giacomo was walking as usual but with an additional bounce in his step for he was after all going over to Delilah Gange’s house, hers was the best and the poshest of the village yet her disposition was kind and of humility yet polished and admirable.
Aliza S. (the Poppy fields near the French countryside)
Frederick claimed to be tired of looking into blue eyes and encouraged not only French, German and Polish immigrants but Greeks and other Mediterraneans to come; he had an immigration office set up in Venice and considered building a mosque in Berlin to attract Turks.
Alexandra Richie (Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin)
Forever, Tom thought. Maybe he’d never go back to the States. It was not so much Europe itself as the evenings he had spent alone, here and in Rome, that made him feel that way. Evenings by himself simply looking at maps, or lying around on sofas thumbing through guidebooks. Evenings looking at his clothes - his clothes and Dickie’s - and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms, and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s. He had polished the suitcase with a special English leather dressing, not that it needed polishing because he took such good care of it, but for its protection. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn’t take money, masses of money, it took a certain security. He had been on the road to it, even with Marc Priminger. He had appreciated Marc’s possessions, and they were what had attracted him to the house, but they were not his own, and it had been impossible to make a beginning at acquiring anything of his own on forty dollars a week. It would have taken him the best years of his life, even if he had economised stringently, to buy the things he wanted. Dickie’s money had given him only an added momentum on the road he had been travelling. The money gave him the leisure to see Greece, to collect Etruscan pottery if he wanted (he had recently read an interesting book on that subject by an American living in Rome), to join art societies if he cared to and to donate to their work. It gave him the leisure, for instance, to read his Malraux tonight as late as he pleased, because he did not have to go to a job in the morning. He had just bought a two-volume edition of Malraux’s Psychologic de I’art which he was now reading, with great pleasure, in French with the aid of a dictionary.
Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1))
Lucy preferred gin and tonics during the summer and switched over to whiskey sours in the winter. At dinner, a sit-down affair with the family, Lucy drank whatever the Temerlins drank, including expensive French wines. "She never gets obnoxious, even when smashed to the brink of unconsciousness," wrote Maurice, revealing more about the chimp's alcoholism than perhaps he intended. At one point, he tried to wean Lucy off the good stuff and onto Boone's Farm apple wine. Assuming she would delight in the fruity swill, he purchased a case and filled her glass one night at dinner. Lucy took a sip of the apple wine, noticed her parents were drinking something else, and put her glass down. She then graabbed Maurice's glass of Chablis and polished it off. She finished Jane's next. Not another sip of Boone's farm ever touched her lips.
Elizabeth Hess (Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human)
I knew that what they did was cruel. Humans are feral and ruthless; this, this watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
they had not yet been destroyed as Africans completely. Slavery was the curse of their existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been characteristically theirs. They tolerated the baptism and modest garments imposed on them by the French Catholic laws; but in the evenings, they made their cheap fabrics into alluring costumes, made jewelry of animal bones and bits of discarded metal which they polished to look like gold; and the slave cabins of Pointe du Lac were a foreign country, an African coast after dark, in which not even the coldest overseer would want to wander.
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1))
complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” For the Poles, Madagascar was an actual island in the actual Indian Ocean, an actual possession of the actual French empire, an actual site of an actual exploratory mission, a subject of actual political discussions, one of two places (along with Palestine) that were seriously considered as destination points for a mass migration of Polish Jewry. Polish leaders did not grasp that for the Nazis the issue was not the feasibility of one deportation plan, but the creation of general conditions under which Jews could be destroyed one way or another.
Timothy Snyder (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning)
You may wonder, as I have, whether U.S. ornithologists assigned “Canada” to the goose’s name for the same reason the Italians called syphilis “the French disease,” while the Poles called it “the German disease” and the Russians called it “the Polish disease.” The answer is no. Taxonomists first observed the geese in Canada.
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet)
Even the simplest interaction racked him with anxiety. He was always missing cues, it seemed. And yet Mercy loved him. He had never asked her why; he was afraid that if she reflected too deeply, she would realize her mistake. He just kept the thought close to his chest, and polished it and cherished it as he had since the day she had said yes to him: Mercy loves me.
Anne Tyler (French Braid)
And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb. I would think of Haarlem, each substantial church set behind its wrought-iron fence and its barrier of doctrine. And I would know again that in darkness God’s truth shines most clear.
Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)
The expedition for the occupation of the Marquesas had sailed from Brest in the spring of 1842, and the secret of its destination was solely in the possession of its commander. No wonder that those who contemplated such a signal infraction of the rights of humanity should have sought to veil the enormity from the eyes of the world. And yet, notwithstanding their iniquitous conduct in this and in other matters, the French have ever plumed themselves upon being the most humane and polished of nations. A high degree of refinement, however, does not seem to subdue our wicked propensities so much after all; and were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged. One
Herman Melville (Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life)
The large drawing-room was an immense, long room, with a sort of gallery that ran from one pavilion to the other, taking up the whole of the façade on the garden side. A large French window opened on to the steps. This gallery glittered with gold. The ceiling, gently arched, had fanciful scrolls winding round great gilt medallions, that shone like bucklers. Bosses and dazzling garlands encircled the arch; fillets of gold, resembling threads of molten metal, ran round the walls, framing the panels, which were hung with red silk; festoons of roses, topped with tufts of full-blown blossoms, hung down along the sides of the mirrors. An Aubusson carpet spread its purple flowers over the polished flooring. The furniture of red silk damask, the door-hangings and window-curtains of the same material, the huge ormolu clock on the mantel-piece, the porcelain vases standing on the consoles, the legs of the two long tables
Émile Zola (Delphi Complete Works of Emile Zola)
The room was small, but as neat as his necktie and as clean as his collar. The fireplace was swept; the floor was bare and polished. Books crowded bookshelves in every possible space. One corner was filled by an elderly flat-top desk; the papers on it were neatly in order. Near it, on its own stand, was a small electric calculator. To her right, french windows gave out on a tiny porch over the garage. Beyond it she could see the sprawling city, where a few neon signs were already blinking.
Robert A. Heinlein (The Year of the Jackpot (The Galaxy Project))
In my native valley of the middle Dniester, gentry spoke Polish, peasants — Ukrainian, officials — Russian with the Odessa accent, merchants — Jewish, carpenters and joiners — being Filippians and Old Believers — Russian with the Novogrod accent, the kabanists spoke in their own dialect. Additionally, in the same area there were also villages of Polish-speaking noblemen, and nobles who spoke Ukrainian, Moldovan villages speaking in Romanian; Gypsies speaking in Gypsy, Turks were no longer there, but in Khotyn, on the other side of the Dniester and in Kamieniec, their minarets were still standing...All these shades of nationality and languages were also in a semi-fluid state. Sons of Poles sometimes became Ukrainians, sons of Germans and French — Poles. In Odessa, unusual things happened: the Greeks became Russians, Poles were seen joining Soyuz Russkavo Naroda. Even stranger combinations arose from mixed marriages. ‘If a Pole marries a Russian woman,’ my father used to say, ‘their children are usually Ukrainians or Lithuanians’.
Jerzy Stempowski (W dolinie Dniestru. Pisma o Ukrainie)
Nor were the intellectuals of the 1920s a vanguard of a new outlook, as they themselves supposed, but the exhausted rearguard of Victorian romanticism. They sought refuge from an industrialised and ugly world. Some, like Virginia Woolf, found it in polishing up an exquisite sensibility. Others, like her husband Leonard Woolf and of course Gilbert Murray, found escape in designing an ideal society...It was a sheltered world, this of the intelligentsia of the 1920s, its inhabitants mostly shielded by private means from crude personal reminders of the outside struggle for survival. They circulated at leisure from country house to country cottage...back again to Bloomsbury or one of the ancient universities; convinced that they carried in their luggage the soul of civilisation. The memoirs of the epoch are fragrant with cultured weekends - witty chat on the lawn and brilliant profundity at the dining table. It was a circle of flimsy and precious people, of whom Lady Ottoline Morrell was perhaps the manliest. And so, while not all intellectuals were active pacifists or internationalists, they were generally more concerned with classical French and Greek culture - 'the good life' - than with 'Philistine' matters like industrial and strategic power.
Correlli Barnett (The Collapse of British Power)
DEATH’S DIARY: THE PARISIANS Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity’s certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower. I’ll never forget the first day in Auschwitz, the first time in Mauthausen. At that second place, as time wore on, I also picked them up from the bottom of the great cliff, when their escapes fell awfully awry. There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas. Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down. Saved you, I’d think, holding their souls in midair as the rest of their being—their physical shells—plummeted to the earth. All of them were light, like the cases of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places. The smell like a stove, but still so cold. I shiver when I remember—as I try to de-realize it. I blow warm air into my hands, to heat them up. But it’s hard to keep them warm when the souls still shiver. God. I always say that name when I think of it. God. Twice, I speak it. I say His name in a futile attempt to understand. “But it’s not your job to understand.” That’s me who answers. God never says anything. You think you’re the only one he never answers? “Your job is to …” And I stop listening to me, because to put it bluntly, I tire me. When I start thinking like that, I become so exhausted, and I don’t have the luxury of indulging fatigue. I’m compelled to continue on, because although it’s not true for every person on earth, it’s true for the vast majority—that death waits for no man—and if he does, he doesn’t usually wait very long. On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down …. Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear. I took them all away, and if ever there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away. Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye. They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
The Foreign Disease The body’s largest organ is the skin. Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed back, calling it the French disease. The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that it’s hard to imagine the Swedish people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it the Russian disease. That’s not how people work.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
For electric vehicles, the power plant generators alimenting the electrical grind will then produce the GHGs, not the car engine itself. Concerns for GHG emissions would then shift to the source of electric power generation and away from car manufacturers. Currently, there is a wide difference in GHGs emissions in various electrical grids, depending on the source of energy fueling the generators. The low emissions from Swedish and French grids are explained by a combination of nuclear and hydroelectric generation, while the high emissions of the Polish and US grids stem from the use of coal as a fuel in some generators. However, the emissions from the Californian grid are nearly half those of the IS average! The regional differences in emissions in the US grid are also explained by the differences in fuels used for electricity generation: California has a high proportion of hydroelectricity and nuclear plants, while in Michigan generation plants the dominant production fuels are coal and crude oil. Anybody concerned with GHG emissions should certainly switch to electric cars in Sweden, France, and California, but should use gasoline when driving in Michigan or Poland!
Alain Bertaud (Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities)
This is difficult to us, because we do not sufficiently distinguish, in our observations upon language, between a clear expression and a strong expression. These are frequently confounded with each other, though they are in reality extremely different. The former regards the understanding, the latter belongs to the passions. The one describes a thing as it is, the latter describes it as it is felt. [...] It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength. The French language has that perfection and that defect. Whereas the Oriental tongues, and in general the languages of most unpolished people, have a great force and energy of expression, and this is but natural. Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them; but, for that reason they admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and therefore express themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner. If the affection be well conveyed, it will work its effect without any clear idea, often without any idea at all of the thing which has originally given rise to it.
Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)
The Grocers'! oh the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of like mistakes, in the best humor possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.
Charles Dickens (Christmas Books)
Mindy runs to the DVD player and delicately places the disk in the holder and presses play. “Will you sit in this chair, please, Princess Mindy?” I ask, bowing deeply at the waist. Mindy giggles as she replies, ”I guess so.” After Mindy sits down, I take a wide-tooth comb and start gently combing out her tangles. Mindy starts vibrating with excitement as she blurts, “Mr. Jeff, you’re gonna fix my hair fancy, ain’t you?” “We’ll see if a certain Princess can hold still long enough for me to finish,” I tease. Immediately, Mindy becomes as still as a stone statue. After a couple of minutes, I have to say, “Mindy, sweetheart, it’s okay to breathe. I just can’t have you bouncing, because I’m afraid it will cause me to pull your hair.” Mindy slumps down in her chair just slightly. “Okay Mr. Jeff, I was ascared you was gonna stop,” she whispers, her chin quivering. I adopt a very fake, very over-the-top French accent and say, “Oh no, Monsieur Jeff must complete Princess Mindy’s look to make the Kingdom happy. Mindy erupts with the first belly laugh I’ve heard all day as she responds, “Okay, I’ll try to be still, but it’s hard ‘cause I have the wiggles real bad.” I pat her on the shoulder and chuckle as I say, “Just try your best, sweetheart. That’s all anyone can ask.” Kiera comes screeching around the corner in a blur, plunks her purse on the table, and says breathlessly, “Geez-O-Pete, I can’t believe I’m late for the makeover. I love makeovers.” Kiera digs through her purse and produces two bottles of nail polish and nail kit. “It’s time for your mani/pedi ma’am. Would you prefer Pink Pearl or Frosted Creamsicle? Mindy raises her hand like a schoolchild and Kiera calls on her like a pupil, “I want Frosted Cream toes please,” Mindy answers. “Your wish is my command, my dear,” Kiera responds with a grin. For the next few minutes, Mindy gets the spa treatment of her life as I carefully French braid her hair into pigtails. As a special treat, I purchased some ribbons from the gift shop and I’m weaving them into her hair. I tuck a yellow rose behind her ear. I don my French accent as I declare, “Monsieur Jeffery pronounces Princess Mindy finished and fit to rule the kingdom.” Kiera hands Mindy a new tube of grape ChapStick from her purse, “Hold on, a true princess never reigns with chapped lips,” she says. Mindy giggles as she responds, “You’re silly, Miss Kiera. Nobody in my kingdom is going to care if my lips are shiny.” Kiera’s laugh sounds like wind chimes as she covers her face with her hands as she confesses, “Okay, you busted me. I just like to use it because it tastes yummy.” “Okay, I want some, please,” Mindy decides. Kiera is putting the last minute touches on her as Mindy is scrambling to stand on Kiera’s thighs so she can get a better look in the mirror. When I reach out to steady her, she grabs my hand in a death grip. I glance down at her. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is opening and closing like a fish. I shoot Kiera a worried glance, but she merely shrugs. “Holy Sh — !” Mindy stops short when she sees Kiera’s expression. “Mr. Jeff is an angel for reals because he turned me into one. Look at my hair Miss Kiera, there are magic ribbons in it! I’m perfect. I can be anything I want to be.” Spontaneously, we all join together in a group hug. I kiss the top of her head as I agree, “Yes, Mindy, you are amazing and the sky is the limit for you.
Mary Crawford (Until the Stars Fall from the Sky (Hidden Beauty #1))
She sighed and leaned down, kissed my thigh, and then looked up, and put her arm around my shoulder, moving close, so our thighs and arms were touching. She put her finger to my lips. “Well, Gwendoline, my dear vampire-pale mistress-confessor, who wishes to possess my soul, the first confession is this: I love playing like this. Being your prisoner is exciting. Her voice had gone throaty, dreamy, and her fingers were playing in my stubble, caressing it, stroking it, my recently shaved skull. We slid to the floor and rolled over. I pinned her down. I bit her left nipple, just a delicate nip and twist, and lingering lick and kiss. Remember! Leave no marks! “Oh, Gwendoline, the silliest things arouse me,” she whispered, her teeth tugging my earlobe. “Like what?” I slid off her body, and lay beside her, both of us now on our sides, face to face, only a few inches apart. “Like what?” I repeated, kissing her, and running my hand over the curve of her hip, and cupping her backside. She took a deep breath. “Certain gestures you make drive me crazy.” “Me?” “Yes, like when you reach up to put the curls at the nape of your neck back in place, or when you just touch the nape of your neck. Or when you tilt your head down and look up from under your eye¬brows that are coal-black like arched arrows in flight. Or like the way your English accent in French is sometimes just a bit awkward, and I want to touch your lips and correct you by kissing you. And then – and this is unbearably beautiful – there’s the self-conscious way you sometimes walk, looking down as if abashed at the cobble¬stones just in front of your toes, as if you were self-conscious of your sexual vulnerability, as if you were shy, and retiring, a vestal virgin, a timid, self-conscious child. And then there’s the way your shoes are always so neat and impeccable, even when it is raining, or muddy. I want to get down on my knees and worship! Everything about you is neat and self-contained, and as if it had been just polished.
Gwendoline Clermont (Gwendoline Goes To School)
How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims—already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead—did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it. While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’ Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped. In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.
Sarah Helm (Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women)
The enemy won some points at the very beginning. On both of the two days preceding his remarks about Worth, Hitchcock notes that American deserters had been shot while crossing the Rio Grande. Probably they were just bored with army rations but there was some thought that they might be responding to a proclamation of General Ampudia’s which spies had been able to circulate in camp. Noting the number of Irish, French, and Polish immigrants in the American force, Ampudia had summoned them to assert a common Catholicism, come across the river, cease “to defend a robbery and usurpation which, be assured, the civilized nations of Europe look upon with the utmost indignation,” and settle down on a generous land bounty. Some of them did so, and the St. Patrick Battalion of American deserters was eventually formed, fought splendidly throughout the war, and was decimated in the campaign for Mexico City — after which its survivors were executed in daily batches.… This earliest shooting of deserters as they swam the Rio Grande, an unwelcome reminder that war has ugly aspects, at once produced an agitation. As soon as word of it reached Washington, the National Intelligencer led the Whig press into a sustained howl about tyranny. In the House J. Q. Adams rose to resolve the court-martial of every officer or soldier who should order the killing of a soldier without trial and an inquiry into the reasons for desertion. He was voted down but thereafter there were deserters in every Whig speech on the conduct of the war, and Calm Observer wrote to all party papers that such brutality would make discipline impossible. But a struggling magazine which had been founded the previous September in the interest of sports got on a sound financial footing at last. The National Police Gazette began to publish lists of deserters from the army, and the War Department bought up big editions to distribute among the troops. Taylor sat in his field works writing prose. Ampudia’s patrols reconnoitered the camp and occasionally perpetrated an annoyance. Taylor badly needed the Texas Rangers, a mobile force formed for frontier service in the Texas War of Independence and celebrated ever since. It was not yet available to him, however, and he was content to send out a few scouts now and then. So Colonel Truman Cross, the assistant quartermaster general, did not return from one of his daily rides. He was still absent twelve days later, and Lieutenant Porter, who went looking for him with ten men, ran into some Mexican foragers and got killed.
Bernard DeVoto (The Year of Decision 1846)
In the middle of the night, Alexander—with the moist towel still on his face—was startled out of sleep by the cheerful drunken whisper of Ouspensky, who was shaking him awake, while taking his hand and placing into it something soft and warm. It took Alexander a moment to recognize the softness and warmness as a large human breast, a breast still attached to a human female, albeit a not entirely sober human female, who breathed fire on him, kneeled near his bed and said something in Polish that sounded like, “Wake up, cowboy, paradise is here.” “Lieutenant,” said Alexander in Russian, “you’re going on the rack tomorrow.” “You will pray to me as if I’m your god tomorrow. She is bought and paid for. Have a good one.” Ouspensky lowered the flaps on the tent and disappeared. Sitting up and turning on his kerosene lamp, Alexander was faced with a young, boozy, not unattractive Polish face. For a minute as he sat up, they watched each other, he with weariness, she with drunken friendliness. “I speak Russian,” she said in Russian. “I’m going to get into trouble being here?” “Yes,” said Alexander. “You better go back.” “Oh, but your friend…” “He is not my friend. He is my sworn enemy. He has brought you here to poison you. You need to go back quickly.” He helped her sit up. Her swinging breasts were exposed through her open dress. Alexander was naked except for his BVDs. He watched her appraise him. “Captain,” she said, “you’re not telling me you are poison? You don’t look like poison.” She reached out for him. “You don’t feel like poison.” She paused, whispering, “At ease, soldier.” Moving away from her slightly—only slightly—Alexander started to put on his trousers. She stopped him by rubbing him. He sighed, moving her hand away. “You left a sweetheart behind? I can tell. You’re missing her. I see many men like you.” “I bet you do.” “They always feel better after they’re with me. So relieved. Come on. What’s the worst that can happen? You will enjoy yourself?” “Yes,” said Alexander. “That’s the worst that can happen.” She stuck out her hand holding a French letter. “Come on. Nothing to be afraid of.” “I’m not afraid,” said Alexander. “Oh, come on.” He buckled his belt. “Let’s go. I’ll walk you back.” “You have some chocolate?” she said, smiling. “I’ll suck you off for some chocolate.” Alexander wavered, lingering on her bare breasts. “As it turns out, I do have some chocolate,” he said, throbbing everywhere, including his heart. “You can have it all.” He paused. “And you don’t even have to suck me off.” The Polish girl’s eyes cleared for a moment. “Really?” “Really.” He reached into his bag and handed her some small pieces of chocolate wrapped in foil. Hungrily she shoved the bars into her mouth and swallowed them whole. Alexander raised his eyebrows. “Better the chocolate than me,” he said. The girl laughed. “Will you really walk me back?” she said. “Because the streets are not safe for a girl like me.” Alexander took his machine gun. “Let’s go.
Paullina Simons (Tatiana and Alexander (The Bronze Horseman, #2))
When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!’ and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: ‘Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.’ It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.
Claire Messud (The Woman Upstairs)
At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch.
Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)
syphilis first surfaces, the English called it the, "French disease," the French called it the, "Spanish disease," Germans called it the, "French evil," the Russians called it the, "Polish disease," the Poles called it the, "Turkish disease," the Turks called it the, "Christian disease," and Japanese called it, "Chinese pox".
John Brown (1000 Shocking Facts You Might Not Have Known)
Graceful phrases fell from his lips in polished French.
Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10))
Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed back, calling it the French disease.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Monsieur Alfred Backert, a resident of Bischoffsheim, lived near the village center. He recalled the war years in Alsace-Lorraine and remembered the women from Mannheim who were sent to Bischoffsheim, ostensibly for their safety by the Nazi Regime. He later served in the French army and was stationed in Germany for a number of years. Frau Heinchen, the elderly woman with her dog, who talked to me on the windy hillside overlooking Überlingen on Sunday afternoon, December 1, 2002. She recalled the Polish and Russian prisoners, whom she called Cossacks, and vividly remembered the hanging of the Russian soldier, described in this book. According to her, it was the farmer’s wife Clarissa who was raped by the Russian soldier and later, bore his child. She remembered the lager (warehouse) that was used to house the prisoners, saying that it was located on a field near the municipal hospital. She also told us the location of where the one room schoolhouse had been. For the limited time that we talked, she glowed and became twenty-one years young again.
Hank Bracker
Efes Damim (No Blood), was originally published in Wilna in 1837 and included text in Hebrew, Latin, Russian, and Polish. The book was subsequently translated into German, French, and English. But on the other side of the debate, the scribblings of August Rohling, a fraudulent professor of Catholic theology who had taught in Milwaukee, Münster, and Prague, were also translated.
Helmut Walser Smith (The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town)
Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The
Serhii Plokhy (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine)
Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The Russian annexation of the Crimea, the hybrid war in the Donbas, and attempts to destabilize the rest of the country created a new and dangerous situation not only in Ukraine but also in Europe as a whole. For the first time since the end of World War II, a major European power made war on a weaker neighbor and annexed part of the territory of a sovereign state. The Russian invasion breached not only the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1997 but also the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which had offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons and acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear state. The unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine threatened the foundations of international order—a threat to which the European Union and most of the world were not prepared to respond but one that demands appropriate counteraction. Whatever the outcome of the current Ukraine Crisis, on its resolution depends not only the future of Ukraine but also that of relations between Europe’s east and west—Russia and the European Union—and thus the future of Europe as a whole.
Serhii Plokhy (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine)
Brother, there’s reason to,” the friar returned. “Think—Jacek wished to send his son away To join the army—then he had him stay In Lithuania. Why? He’s needed here At home! You’ve heard the widespread talk, I’m sure— That I’ve brought fitful news about. Well, brother, It’s time to say it all to one another. This is momentous! War is here! A war For Poland! War, yes! We’ll be Poles once more! When I arrived here on my secret mission The vanguard was already in position Over the Niemen. Napoleon has grown A host such as the world has never known! And with the French there is a Polish force! Our Józef, our Dąbrowski, and of course All our white eagles! At the Emperor’s sign They’ll cross the river—and Poland lives again!
Adam Mickiewicz
All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages—Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance—this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla). In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
The admixture of British, French, Polish, Belgian, and Dutch inmates had lent the place a peculiarly cosmopolitan atmosphere.
Ben Macintyre (Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison)
The battle within Colditz was now a two-sided conflict between the British and the Germans. There was no longer a danger that an escape plan secretly mounted by one nation might trip up another. Colditz became a British prison: the hierarchy of rank was more pronounced, as was the control exerted by the escape committee, and the opportunity for one-man ventures was reduced. The Dutch Hawaiian band, the French cuisine, and the Polish choir were gone. The informal cultural osmosis between nationalities was over, as was the fruitful Anglo-Dutch partnership and the daily babble of diverse languages in the inner courtyard. Padre Platt noticed that as an all-Anglo prison, the place seemed more cliquey, with “small friendship groups, complete in themselves and almost exclusive.
Ben Macintyre (Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison)
So the groom sips brandy long after his bride has gone to bed.” Rillieux stepped forward through the throng impeccably dressed, every button on his uniform polished to a shine, a grin on his face. “If she were my wife, I’d long since have joined her.” There were shouts of agreement, laughter. Morgan met Rillieux’s gaze, smiled. “A man should ne’er rush a woman when it comes to passion.” Rillieux’s smile broadened. “Or perhaps you fear you cannot rise to the occasion.” Laughter turned to guffaws as the humor became more ribald. Morgan chuckled. “You Frenchmen fight wi’ wee sabers, aye? We Highland Scots carry broadswords. They ne’er fail us.” More guffaws and a shout or two of protest. Some of the amusement faded from Rillieux’s face, his eyes betraying the hatred he’d been trying to mask. “We French are renowned the world over as lovers, while you Scots”--he spat the word—“are known for your dourness.” There was no laughter now, only silence. “Is that so?” Morgan tossed back the rest of his brandy, set the crystal snifter aside. “Then remember this—in a fort full of Frenchmen, the lass chose a Scot.
Pamela Clare (Untamed (MacKinnon's Rangers, #2))
But if the case be thus with the Latin versions, how great are the contempt and profanation shown in the French, German, Polish and other languages! And yet here is one of the most successful artifices adopted by the enemy of Christianity and of unity in our age, to attract the people. He knew the curiosity of men, and how much one esteems one’s own judgment, and therefore he has induced his sectaries to translate the Holy Scriptures, every one into the tongue of the province where he finds himself placed, and to maintain this unheard-of opinion, that every one is capable of understanding the Scriptures, that all should read them, and that the public offices should be celebrated and sung in the vulgar tongue of each district. But who sees not the artifice? There is nothing in the world which, passing through many hands, does not change and lose it first luster: wine which has been often poured out and poured back loses its freshness and strength, wax when handled changes its color, coins lose their stamp. Be sure also that Holy Scripture, passing through so many translators, in so many versions and reversions, cannot but be altered. And if in the Latin versions there is such a variety of opinion among these turners of Scripture, how much more in their vernacular and mother-tongue editions, which not every one is able to check or to criticize? It gives a very great license to translators to know that they will only be tested by those of their own province. Every district has not such clear seeing eyes as France and Germany. “Are we sure,” says a learned profane writer,927 “that in the Basque provinces and in Brittany there are persons of sufficient judgment to give authority to this translation made into their tongue; the universal Church has no more arduous decision to give;” it is Satan’s plan for corrupting the integrity of this holy Testament. He well knows the result of disturbing and poisoning the source; it is at once to spoil all that comes after.
Francis de Sales (The Saint Francis de Sales Collection [15 Books])
Chanters, second-edition sellers, boardwalkers, strawers, mountebanks, clowns, jugglers, conjurors, grease removers, nostrum vendors, fortune-tellers, French polishers, turnpike sailors, various classes of lurkers and peepers, stenographic-card sellers, racetrack-card sellers.
Stephen Hunter (I, Ripper: A Novel)
A not uncommon practice was to associate nationality with a particular disease, often sexually transmitted. For example, the English called syphilis "The French Disease"; the French called it "The Italian Disease"; the Italians called it "The Turkish Disease"; the Russians called it "The Polish Disease"; and both the Japanese and the Indians termed it "The Portuguese Disease." Only the Spanish accepted any blame, referring to it as "The Spanish Disease.
Daniel N. Leeson (Opus Ultimum: The Story of the Mozart Requiem)
The magic of America is that we're a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.” Quote by Madeleine Albright, Former Secretary of State. Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová on May 15, 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996 and was confirmed unanimously by the Senate to become the first woman to hold a Cabinet post as Secretary of State. She currently serves as the Chairperson of the Albright Stonebridge Group and is a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. In May 2012, Secretary Albright was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Aside from English she speaks French, Russian, and Czech; she also understands Polish and Serbo-Croatian.
Hank Bracker
FOR MONTHS FOLLOWING THE AMERICANS’ DEAL WITH DARLAN, European exiles gathered at the White Tower, York Minster, and other favored restaurants and pubs in London to smoke endless cigarettes and discuss the agreement’s implications. The Free French were the ones most directly affected, of course. But the other émigrés—Norwegians, Poles, Czechoslovaks, Belgians, and Dutch—were also worried about what the deal might mean for the future. The Nazis had invaded and occupied their countries, too. When the time came for those nations to be liberated, would the Americans cooperate with traitors like Darlan? Most of the Europeans meeting over wine-stained tablecloths that winter had escaped to London in the chaos-filled spring of 1940, when German troops conquered Norway and Denmark, then rolled through France and the Low Countries. Every other day, it seemed, George VI and Winston Churchill had been summoned to one of the city’s train stations to welcome yet another king, queen, president, or prime minister. As the only country in Europe still holding out against Hitler, Britain was, as Polish troops put it, the “Last Hope Island” for émigrés who wanted to continue the fight. And London, which housed de Gaulle’s movement and six governments-in-exile, had become the de facto capital of free Europe. The
Lynne Olson (Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour)
The British invented the tank. The British first employed it in battle. The British won the first battles using tanks. In 1916-17 Britain was, as one might say, the Tank Champion of the world. How then did the British tank equipment and strategy of 1939-44 become such a shambles? How was the champion so easily deposed? Why did so many British (and French and Canadian and Polish) tank crews die unnecessarily and their infantry go unsupported into the valleys of death?
Ken Tout (A Fine Night for Tanks: The Road to Falaise)
He found a location in the north of the island from where to view the transit, but it was too late to build a proper observatory. Instead he placed some big boulders in a circle and constructed a small hut to house the instruments. It was so crudely built that it gave little protection from wind, dust and animals. The instruments had already suffered from the long sea voyage with some ‘eaten by rust’, Pingré moaned, hectically polishing and greasing them with turtle oil, the only lubricant available. Over the next days, the French astronomer prepared his instruments and observed the movements of Jupiter’s satellites at night in order to set the clock – an enterprise that was sabotaged by the rats that chewed through one of the pendulums. At
Andrea Wulf (Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens)
The Hotel Maillot, where they resided for four months, had French personnel and Jewish customers: Polish, Hungarian, Romanian refugees. Everybody was waiting for a visa - all displaced persons, everybody clinging to a hope, a piece of paper. In the yard of the hotel, red-cheeked peasant girls from Bretagne washed the hotel laundry. They also cleaned the rooms, scrubbed with rags and brooms. When the cleaning girl would come in and see Father in bed, she would say: "Monsieur shlooft" (Monsieur is sleeping, in Yiddish) and would come later. The only pleasant aspect of that time was the proximity of the Bois de Boulogne, which reminded my parents of home, of the Habsburgshohe. They watched children playing and the boats on the lake and there they spent hours upon hours. They hoped that one of their children would come to rescue them from that exile - Bernie or Pearl.
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
On August 31, 1939, SS men dressed in Polish uniforms took over a radio station inside Germany and broadcast messages urging Poles living in eastern Germany to rebel against the Nazis. The bodies of prison inmates were dressed in Polish uniforms and left on site as if they had perpetrated the act and had been killed by German police.8 The transparent ploy would be cited as a preemptive Polish hostile action by Germany. Despite this, British and French diplomats begged the Polish high command to retract the mobilization order. The next morning German troops stormed across the border and World War II in Europe began.
Kenneth Koskodan (No Greater Ally: The Untold Story of Poland's Forces in World War II (General Military))
In 1940, Heinrich Himmler, wanting to extend SS influence to the rocket program, pressured Wernher von Braun into joining the organization despite his lack of political commitment. Von Braun joined chiefly to keep working on his passion, rocketry, but his eventual rise to the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) tainted his reputation and dogged him following the war. A few years later, Arthur Rudolph and several other leading Peenemünde figures began using slave labor at the facility in 1942. Contrary to their later claims that Himmler forced this move on them, their letters and memos at the time indicate nothing but enthusiasm among this group's members for the use of Soviet, Polish, and French POWs for coerced labor.
Charles River Editors (Operation Paperclip: The History of the Secret Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America During and After World War II)
In his 1899 critique of upper-class values, The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen wrote, 'The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe add the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult.' Women may no longer wear bonnets, and high-heeled shoes may no longer be seen as hindrances to employment, but the fact remains that 'the more elegant styles' are outside the reach of most working women. They require more money, more attention, and more leisure than the average working woman can afford. This is their point.
Carina Chocano (You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages)
These are not sketches.” “They’re not?” Before Jenny could grab the bag back, Louisa extracted a sheaf of letters. “Oh, good. Some are written in German, and I do enjoy German. This one’s Italian, and there are several in French. This must be… I didn’t know Elijah had a grasp of Russian.” “He spent a year in St. Petersburg. Let me see those.” Louisa handed over one, the first one in French, and watched while Jenny translated. “Oh, that dear, dratted, man. That dear, dear…” Rather than listen to Jenny prattle on, Louisa translated another of the French missives. “These are letters of introduction. Your dear, dratted man has written you letters of introduction all over the Continent. This one is written in French but addressed to some Polish count. This one is to some fellow on Sicily. Will I ever see you again?” “There are ruins on Sicily. Greek, Roman, Norman… Beautiful ruins.” What that had to do with anything mattered little compared to the ruins Louisa beheld in her sister’s eyes. “Was he trying to send you away?” Jenny handed Louisa the letter, watching with a hungry gaze as Louisa tucked the epistles back into their traveling bag. “I didn’t ask Elijah for those letters, and I won’t use them.” “Why in blazes not?” Blazes was not quite profanity. When a woman became responsible for small children, her vocabulary learned all manner of detours. “Because he’ll never get into the Academy if he’s seen promoting the career of a woman in the arts. The Academy has been his goal and his dream for years, and he’s given up years of time among his family to pursue it. There’s unfortunate history between one of the committee members and Elijah’s mother, and it will obstruct Elijah’s path if he’s seen to further my artistic interests. I would not jeopardize Elijah’s happiness for anything.” Elijah.
Grace Burrowes (Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (The Duke's Daughters, #5; Windham, #8))
The entire town comes together in comradery for the Blood Moon, with most shops giving away free gifts to everyone who passes by. Clair De Lune Bakery passes out lychee mooncakes, reminding me of my childhood celebrating the Lunar New Year. Petals Tea Shop hands out sachets of white peony tea and jasmine blossoms. Luna's Love Shack tosses free ribbons out at the front of the store, embroidered with metallic stars and moonflowers. A French restaurant, La Vie en Rose, offers moon water in polished wine glasses to anyone who stops to look at their menu. Some flower stands even hand out moonflowers for free instead of selling them.
Kiana Krystle (Dance of the Starlit Sea)
A French couple, an Irish couple, and a Polish couple are having dinner together. The Frenchman says to his wife, "Pass me the sugar, Sugar." Not to be outdone, the Irishman says, "Could you pass me the honey, Honey?" Most impressed by these clever endearments, the Pole leans over to his wife and says, "Pass me the pork, Pig." Avoid copying; otherwise, you will do something stupid.
Manoj Chenthamarakshan (50 Things to realize before it's too late)
Mr. Campbell," a voice called. "Mr. Trevor Campbell." Trevor turned to find a tall, severe looking woman wrapped in a dark coat over her dark dress, all edged in smoky gray fur, approaching in heels that would have been deadly on level dry ground, but even more so on the uneven boards with drifts of snow that made up their portion of the train platform. And yet she seemed not to notice. Though the wind blew a bit where they stood in the open, not one dark hair strayed from her sleek French twist. Dusky skin showed off a polished glow over sharp cheek bones and a thin, straight nose. Her dark eyebrows winged up in haughty arches over her sooty eyes that seemed to burn with a fire that had Trevor feeling slightly mesmerized and uneasy at the same time. "Ahh, I caught you just in time," she said in an oddly accented voice. "And you too, Mr. Jackson Campbell." The boys looked at one another and then back at this strange apparition as she presented them each with her business card. "I represent your grandfather's law firm," she announced before turning to wave over a couple of rough-looking men carrying large boxes. "As you did not make it to your grandfather's will reading, I have been charged with providing you with a copy of the will as it pertains to you and your inheritance." The train blew its whistle to give a five minute warning. Trevor could see the conductor hurrying boys on board as the train's engine began to build up steam for its departure. The woman handed Trevor and Jackson each an envelope which was sealed with their grandfather's crest in wax. "These are your copies of the will and instructions from your grandfather.
Denise Bruchman (The Art of War: A Deadly Inheritance Novel)
Blaming certain groups for outbreaks is not a new phenomenon. In the sixteenth century, the English believed syphilis came from France, so referred to it as the ‘French pox’. The French, believing it to be from Naples, called it the ‘Neopolitan disease’. In Russia, it was the Polish disease, in Poland it was Turkish, and in Turkey it was Christian.[75]
Adam Kucharski (The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop)
Allison Coudert has argued that Leibniz was almost certainly influenced by Jewish Kabbalah, with its own esoteric use of combinatorial procedures for exploring the mysteries of the Godhead through gematria and other arithmosophical theurgies.7 Despite the arcane sources of his inspiration, however, Leibniz was not alone among mainstream early modern philosophers in the quest for a “science of sciences,” nor was he alone among moderns in his quest for secret knowledge, as evidenced, for example, by Newton's vast writings on alchemy. Even Descartes, who argued for a rigid distinction between mind and matter, had insisted on their practical unity at the level of “the living.” As Deleuze puts it in his preface to Malfatti's work, “Beyond a psychology disincarnated in thought, and a physiology mineralized in matter,” even Descartes believed in the possibility of a unified field “where life is defined as knowledge of life, and knowledge as life of knowledge” (MSP, 143). This is the unity, Deleuze asserts, to which Malfatti's account of mathesis as a “true medicine” aspires. Deleuze explicitly refers to mathesis universalis at several key points in Difference and Repetition, particularly in connection with what he calls the “esoteric” history of the calculus (DR, 170). As Christian Kerslake has argued, Deleuze's reference here is not merely to obscure or unusual interpretations of mathematics, but to the decisive significance of Josef Hoëné-Wronski, a Polish French émigré who had elaborated a “messianism” of esoteric knowledge based on the idea that the calculus represented access to the total range of cosmic periodicities and rhythmic imbrications.8 The full implications
Joshua Ramey (The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal)
Semi-enclosed within a rampart of books, she was reading intensely, oblivious of everything except the volumes she had gathered around her. Freddy tilted his head and read the titles on the bindings, whispering them as he read. He had assumed that her selection would be heavy on fashion, makeup, and “celebrities,” but he was wrong. With her left hand resting possessively on Who’s Who in Zimbabwe, she was deep in Sources and Methods of Hiccup Diagnosis. She had also chosen the Directory of Polish Hydraulic Fluid Wholesalers; the Encyclopaedia of Angels; the Catalogue of Chuvash Books in German Libraries; Aboriginal Science Fiction; The Register of Non-Existent Churches; A Bibliography of Indonesian Military Poetry; Orators Who Possessed Horses; Lloyds’ Survey of Failed Board Games; A Dictionary of the Efik Language; The Picture Book of Albanian Idioms—a list in her handwriting lay next to the latter, beginning with the entry, “I ka duart të prera, ‘to have one’s hands cut off,’ ”—The Language of the French & Indian War, Vol. I, Obscene Expressions; Glossary of Dead Architects (Freddy couldn’t wait to read the latest entries); and, finally, though not least, Nicknames of Popular Fish. “You see,” he told her, “it’s fascinating.” “Yes, I love it. Now go away.” “I have our press.” “I couldn’t care less about our press.” She held up Who’s Who in Zimbabwe. “There’s a whole world out there, Freddy, that has nothing to do with us.
Mark Helprin (Freddy and Fredericka)
The protest was buried in classified files, where it remained undisturbed for decades. Roughly similar treatment was accorded protests of U.S. unwillingness to transfer suspected war criminals to the Belgian, French, Polish, and Czechoslovak governments.32
Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
We would also like to add the following to the birth bag repertoire: trashy magazines to read with your client—especially if she gets an epidural—ditto for nail polish, a list of local resources that can help your client get on her feet, LUNA bars in every flavor they produce, a neck pillow, cash for the hospital diner where you will invariably eat your victory meal when it’s all done (our menu favorite is spanakopita and french fries).
Mary Mahoney (The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People)
Still-life Through the open French window the warm sun lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid round a bowl of crimson roses, for one - a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast, butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot, and, heaped on a salver, the morning's post. She comes over the lawn, the young heiress, from her early walk in her garden-wood feeling that life's a table set to bless her delicate desires with all that's good, that even the unopened future lies like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.
Elizabeth Daryush
Jewish authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.3 Such achievement requires an explanation, and an interesting possibility is that Jews have adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity. People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it. Instead, given the new recognition of human evolution in the historical past, it is possible that Jewish intellectual achievement has emerged from some pressure in their special history. Just as races have evolved in the recent past, ethnicities within races will also evolve if they are reproductively isolated to some extent from their host population, whether by geography or religion. The adaptation of Jews to a special cognitive niche, if indeed this has been an evolutionary process, as is argued below, represents a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.
Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
Surely . . . Judaism is more than the history of anti-semitism. Surely Jews deserve to be defined—and are in fact defined, by others as well as by themselves—by those qualities of faith, lineage, sacred texts and moral teachings that have enabled them to endure through centuries of persecution. —GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB1 In many spheres of life, Jews have made contributions that are far larger than might be expected from their numbers. Jews constitute 0.2% of the world’s population, but won 14% of Nobel Prizes in the first half of the 20th century, despite social discrimination and the Holocaust, and 29% in the second. As of 2007, Jews had won an amazing 32% of Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century.2 Jews have excelled not only in science but also in music (Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg), in painting (Pissarro, Modigliani, Rothko), and in philosophy (Maimonides, Bergson, Wittgenstein). Jewish authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.3 Such achievement requires an explanation, and an interesting possibility is that Jews have adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity. People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it. Instead, given the new recognition of human evolution in the historical past, it is possible that Jewish intellectual achievement has emerged from some pressure in their special history. Just as races have evolved in the recent past, ethnicities within races will also evolve if they are reproductively isolated to some extent from their host population, whether by geography or religion. The adaptation of Jews to a special cognitive niche, if indeed this has been an evolutionary process, as is argued below, represents a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.
Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
What, because he has a penis, I’m supposed to go over like nine pins?
Elise Hyatt (A French Polished Murder (Daring Finds Book 2))
Cousin Bette is an inimitable character, a villainess of the worst kind: mean-spirited, vengeful, small-minded. And yet what a joy she is. Bette’s desire for revenge stems from her obsession with her cousin. Adeline is more beautiful and charismatic than Bette. And she has “stolen” the man Bette should have married. Bette seems to conveniently ignore the fact that the man Adeline has married—Baron Hulot—is not someone anyone would want to be married to. The seed of resentment is sown early on, then, and Bette schemes to bring down Baron Hulot, his wife, and their entire family. Because if she can’t be happy, then no one can. She enlists Valérie Marneffe, her neighbor, to seduce Baron Hulot and wheedle as much money as possible out of him, all the while knowing that he is all but ruined by his previous mistress, Josépha. Meanwhile Bette develops a maternal/romantic attachment to her upstairs neighbor, Wenceslas Steinbock, a Polish artist, whom she prevented from committing suicide
Viv Groskop (Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature)
Francuzi są eleganccy i rycerscy, istni Polacy Zachodu.
Jaroslav Hašek (O Podhalu, Galicji i... Piłsudskim. Szkice nieznane)
did Jacinth serve just root beer, in his saloon, or did he perhaps serve things that were stronger in the back?
Elise Hyatt (A French Polished Murder (Daring Finds Book 2))
In 1524 the New Testament appeared in Swyzerdeutsch, followed in 1526 by the first complete Bible in Dutch, and in 1530 in French (although a translation of the Vulgate, not from the original tongues). In the same year a New Testament was published ‘tradotto in lingua toscana’. An Icelandic New Testament appeared in 1540, the first complete Swedish Bible in 1541, a Finnish New Testament in 1548 and a complete Danish Bible in 1550. The first Bible in Spanish was published only in 1569, printed in Basle and later distributed from Frankfurt. Spain itself remained implacably hostile to the vernacular. Further east, a Slovene New Testament was published in 1557– 60, a Croat New Testament in 1563, a Polish Bible (Catholic, from the Vulgate) in 1561, a Hungarian Bible in 1590.
Adam Nicolson (God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible)
The countess's dispassionate gaze fell on Cassandra first, and she motioned for the girl to approach. "The posture is merely adequate," she observed, "but that can be corrected. What are your accomplishments, child?" Having been prepared for the question in advance, Cassandra replied hesitantly. "My lady, I am able to sew, draw, and watercolor. I play no instruments, but I am well-read." "Have you studied languages?" "A little French." "Have you any hobbies?" "No, ma'am." "Excellent. Men are afraid of girls with hobbies." Glancing at Kathleen, Lady Berwick remarked in an aside, "She's a beauty. With a bit more polish, she'll be the belle of the season.
Lisa Kleypas (Marrying Winterborne (The Ravenels, #2))
Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis ... the microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed back, calling it the French disease. The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that it's hard to imagine the Swedish people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it the Russian disease. That's not how people work. We need someone to blame and if a single foreigner came here with the disease, then we would happily blame the whole country. No further investigation needed.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
As the light faded on that cold afternoon, Brătianu presented Rumania’s case. Rich and polished to the point of absurdity, Brătianu had a profound sense of his own importance. He had been educated in the Hautes Ecoles in Paris, and never let anyone forget it; he loved to be discovered lying on a sofa with a book of French verse in a languid hand. Nicolson, who met him at a lunch early on in the conference, was not impressed: “Brătianu is a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man. Handsome and exuberant, he flings his fine head sideways, catching his own profile in the glass. He makes elaborate verbal jokes, imagining them to be Parisian.” Women rather liked him.
Margaret MacMillan (Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World)
1908 was also the year in which Picasso bought his first picture by Henri Rousseau: this was a very large canvas, the portrait of Yadwigha, a kind Polish schoolmistress. “It obsessed me from the moment I saw it,” he told Florent Fels. “I was walking along the rue des Martyrs. A second-hand dealer had piles of canvases all along the front of his shop. A head stuck out, a woman’s face with a hard look … French penetration, clarity, decision. A huge canvas. I asked the price. ‘Five francs,’ said the dealer, ‘You can paint over it.’ It is one of the most revealing French psychological portraits.
Patrick O'Brian (Picasso: A Biography)
There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side’s “Black Belt.
Timothy B. Tyson (The Blood of Emmett Till)
Even now certain of its formations were being moved off to the west, where the French and British, much to our surprise, had looked idly on as their Polish ally was being annihilated.
Erich von Manstein (Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler's Most Brilliant General [Illustrated Edition])
With nothing more than gigue [a quick French dance] I can express four important affects: anger or eagerness, pride, simple-minded desire, and flightiness. On the other hand, if I had to set open-hearted and frank words to music, I should choose no species of melody other than the Polish one, the polonaise [ceremonial, processional music].
James Gaines (Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment)
There was a program on the computer ... where two people could “chat” to each other while on the computer, sharing information. Woz ... hacked into the depths of the system and discovered a way to break in on other people’s electronic conversations. So when Gordon French, for instance, was flaming about his new trick with the 8008 Chicken Hawk, his home terminal would inexplicably begin printing out these semiobscene Polish jokes, and he never did figure out that somewhere miles away Steve Wozniak was doubled up in laughter.
Steven Levy (Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Chapters 1 and 2)
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MA (The Ask ANYTHING Journal)
This replacement of officers with strategical talents by those with a taste for quantity bears a curious resemblance to what happened in the armies of the European monarchies at the end of the eighteenth century. Guibert wrote about the unreformed French army of 1773: “We have created a uniform which obliges the soldier and the officer to spend three hours a day on their toilette, which has turned men of war into wig brushers, shiners and polishers.
John Ralston Saul (Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West)
Stalin forcefully put it in 1941, justifying his murderous industrialization and collectivization programs that killed and immiserated millions, in the name of this savage vision of history: She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness, military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness.
Mark Galeotti (A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin)