Lake Geneva Quotes

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

I contempleted the lake; the waters were placid, all around was calm and the snowy mountains... the calm and heavenly scene restored me and I continued my journey toward Geneva.

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.

I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father's estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

fortify the bank of the Rhône for a distance of eighteen miles between the Lake of Geneva and the Jura, the frontier between the Helvetii and the Sequani. This was effected by means of a rampart sixteen feet high with a trench running parallel. He then placed redoubts at intervals along the fortification and garrisoned them with pickets,

The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta. Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti's Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle Epoque, Edward VII, d'Annunzio, the munitions kings, where all stroll by the lake and play miniature golf, home at last.

In the meantime he employed the legion he had with him, and the troops that had been raised in the Province, to fortify the bank of the Rhône for a distance of eighteen miles between the Lake of Geneva and the Jura, the frontier between the Helvetii and the Sequani. This was effected by means of a rampart sixteen feet high with a trench running parallel. He then placed redoubts at intervals along the fortification and garrisoned them with pickets, so that he could stop the Helvetii more easily, should they attempt to force a passage.

The snow melted,” wrote Ursula, “and the spring had a fairy tale beauty.” The warmer weather brought a flood of wild daffodils to the hills above the chalet, and no fewer than three spies to the Molehill. Alexander Foote and Len Beurton traveled separately to Switzerland and checked into a Montreux boardinghouse, the Pension Elisabeth, overlooking Bon Port on Lake Geneva. The next day, while the children and Ollo “made their way through a sea of flowers, picking arms full of daffodils,” the three conspirators sat in Ursula’s kitchen and discussed how to murder Hitler. Foote was distinctly alarmed to discover that in the intervening weeks the ambiguous injunction to “keep an eye” on Hitler at the Osteria Bavaria “had

I don’t have a bathin’ suit,” I tell them. “Don’t worry,” Brittany says. “Doug probably has one in the pool house you can wear.” In the pool house, Doug looks through a drawer searching for suits. “There’s only two here.” Doug picks up a skimpy Speedo and holds it out to me. “This okay for you, big guy?” “That wouldn’t fit my right testicle. Why don’t you wear it and I’ll take this one,” I say, reaching around Doug and grabbing a boxer-type suit. I notice the girls are gone. “Where’d they go?” “To change. And to talk about us, I’m sure.” In the small changing room as I strip and get into the suit, I think about my life back home. Here, in Lake Geneva, it’s easy to forget about home life for a while. Not having to worry about who’s got my back. When I step out of the changing room, Doug says, “She’ll take a lot of shit by being with you, you know. People are already starting to talk.” “Listen, Douggie. I like that girl more than I can remember likin’ anything in my life. I’m not about to give her up. I’ll start carin’ about what other people think when I’m six feet under.” Doug smiles and holds out his arms. “Ah, Fuentes, I think we just had a male bonding moment. Wanna hug?” “Not on your life, white boy.” Doug slaps me on the back, then we walk to the hot tub. Despite everything, I think we do have, if not a bonding, then at least an understanding. Either way, I’m still not hugging him.

You want my advice?” Sierra asks. I look at her warily. “I don’t know. You hated the idea of Alex and me together from the beginning.” “That’s not true, Brit. I didn’t tell you this, but he’s actually a nice guy when he loosens up. I had fun the day we all went to Lake Geneva. Doug did, too, and even said Alex was cool to hang with. I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but either forget about him, or give him everything you’ve got in your arsenal.” “Is that what you do with Doug?” She smiles. “Sometimes Doug needs a wake-up call. When our relationship starts getting comfortable, I do something to switch it up. Don’t interpret my advice as an excuse to go after Alex. But if he’s what you really want, well, then, who am I to tell you not to go for it? I hate seeing you sad, Brit.” “Was I happy with Alex?” “Obsessed is more like it. But yeah, I saw you happy. Happier than you’ve been in a really, really long time. With someone you like that much, the lows are as low as the highs are high. Does that make sense?” “It does. It also makes me sound bipolar.” “Love will do that to a person.

a tea shop in Oxford, Freddie told Tessa about it. ‘If you’re in the Fifth and Sixth, you’re allowed to skate for half an hour before prep. And an hour at weekends.’ ‘Do you remember,’ said Tessa, ‘when we were living in Geneva, and we used to go skating on the lake?’ ‘Mama used to watch,’ said Freddie. ‘She used to sit in the café, drinking hot chocolate.’ They often talked about their mother; had decided to, mutually and silently, three years ago, the spring after they had left Italy, after they had been told that she had died during an acute asthmatic attack. That was how you kept someone alive. ‘We were staying in that funny little pension,’ said Freddie. ‘What was the landlady’s name? Madame . . . Madame . . .’ ‘Madame Depaul.’Tessa smiled. ‘We had toasted cheese for supper every night. Madame Depaul thought that was what English people liked to eat. In the morning, after breakfast, Mama used to put on her fur coat and we’d all go down to the lake.’ Tessa had inherited her mother’s fur coat. When it had first arrived from Italy, Christina’s scent had lingered. Tessa had put on the coat and closed her eyes and breathed in Mitsouko and had cried, her

Don’t throw away God’s plan for you just to chase a dream of your own making.

Reagan: “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?” Gorbachev: “No doubt about it.” Reagan: “We, too.” Conversation between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Lake Geneva summit,

As far as I know, John Chapman never set foot in Geneva, New York, but there is an orchard there where I caught my last and in some ways most vivid glimpse of him. Here on the banks of Lake Geneva, in excellent apple-growing country, a government outfit called the Plant Genetic Resources Unit maintains the world’s largest collection of apple trees. Some 2,500 different varieties have been gathered from all over the world and set out here in pairs, as if on a beached botanical ark. The card catalog of this fifty-acre tree archive runs the pomological gamut from Adam’s Pearmain, an antique English apple, to the German Zucalmagio. In between a browser will find almost every variety discovered in America since the Roxbury Russet distinguished itself in a cider orchard outside Boston in 1645

Federer, then fourteen, was in his first year as a boarding student in Ecublens, a suburb of Lausanne on Lake Geneva. He was still in his home country but very much an outsider as a youngster from German-speaking Basel. The primary language in Lausanne is French, and Federer arrived in August 1995 with a problem

Clos des Mésanges was a luxurious house; it had seven bedrooms and a caretaker’s lodge and was set on several acres of land in the village of Blonay, just above Lake Geneva.

From Geneva, we drove for a time on the motorway illegally without buying a vignette, but our consciences got the better of us and we took a slight deviation on minor roads through the towns that line the north of the lake with tantalising glimpses of the water, before picking up the road that would take us through the mountains.  This was quite interesting, but slightly boring after the much more imposing Alps.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffeehouses, in the government buildings, in boats on Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffeehouses, in the government buildings, in boats on Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.