#madam

I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137) ↗

— Stephen Clarke

#bed #cannonball #cartoon #cartwheel #ceiling

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#disliked #eternal #friendship #gravy #i

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#madame-bovary #love

She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#love

Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love at all seasons, madam: that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals. ↗

— Pierre Beaumarchais

#drinking #love #madam #making #other

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#conventions #duty #gustave-flaubert #life #madame-bovary

That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it? ↗

— Peter Washington

#belief-system #madame-blavatsky-s-baboon #mystic #mysticism #religion

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#death #end #enough #far #keep

In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#form-of-address #formality #london #madam #miss

Sometimes I get to put on posh frocks and be Madam Glamour, the vendor of my wares. My lovely friend Kath, a stylist, puts me into things I'd never dream of. But my real life is very different. It's very, very home-based - an intense domestic life, that's the core of everything. ↗

— Emma Thompson

#different #domestic #domestic life #dream #everything