An Ode To Paris - A Moveable Feast...

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as

a young man, then wherever you go for

the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is

a moveable feast.” 

   ~ Ernest Hemingway

Small old apartment with a skylight

Resplendent bohemian – a place to loaf

Work at anything,

To make money to get by

Write

Sit outside at café’s and drink coffee, red wine and absinthe

Walk along the Seine

Let the city fill and infatuate my senses

Expatriate, lover, explorer

A journey that may never be returned from.

 

“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”  ~ Ernest Hemingway

"Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D’Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?"

~ Margaret Anderson

"Zelda had a very bad hangover. They had been up on Montmartre the night before and had quarreled because Scott did not want to get drunk. He had decided, he told me, to work hard and not to drink and Zelda was treating him as though he were a kill-joy or a spoilsport." ~ Ernest Hemingway, "Hawks Do Not Share," A Moveable Feast

  "To err is human. To loaf is Parisian."

~ Victor Hugo

"The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable."

~Henry Miller

"The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners."

                                                                                                                ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

"On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive." ~ Ernest Hemingway, "Shakespeare and Company," A Moveable Feast

"But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed."

~ Ernest Hemingway, "People of the Seine," A Moveable Feast

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

                                                     ~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast