"The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken, confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river-only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still...you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't seen before, either.
It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away."
-Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon
6 comments:
I long to go back too! That quote made me smile as I remembered my own trip there and how magical that city was. A perfect city full of interesting people and amazing sights.
It's my favorite city in the entire world, and I feel like that quote sums it up perfectly. :)
I SO heart Paris!!!
I know the feeling - I lived in Paris for 13 months and I loved every moment.
To walk along the Seine, the open markets, sit on the steps of Sacré Coeur with a bottle of wine, the friendly strangers...I could go on and on.
But alas, my French work visa expired and here I am, in Canada, missing Paris...
thank you so much for posting that line. paris to the moon is on my reading list. I just stayed in paris for the summer and now i'm back in the states and no one seems to understand why i feel so dead here. i am determined to go back. and stay.
I went in October half term.
I miss it so much.
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