5 DAYS IN PARIS: A STORY

Gregory A. Buford, MD FACS

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” Oscar Wilde

“A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.” Thomas Jefferson

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography.  Rome is feminine.  So is Odessa.  London is a teenager, an urchin, and this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens.  Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.” John Berger

“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

“... you’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.” E.A. Bucchianeri

“I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.” Amy Thomas

“Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.” Michael Simkins, Detour de France: An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education

“There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.” Vincent van Gogh

“The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).” Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works

“Boy those French, they have a different word for everything.” Steve Martin

“In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner.  If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it’s on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.” Roman Polanski

“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“Let me be mad, then, by all means! mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l'amour! Vive l'animalisme! Vive le Diable!” Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris

“I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.” Josephine Baker

America is my country and Paris is my hometown. Gertrude Stein

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.” Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast