John Vinocur Quotations

The American cemetery at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer is a great lawn at the edge of the sea, white marble crosses and Stars of David against an open horizon. very American in the best sense: no phony piety, simple, easy.

Real life in Paris, the waiting-for-a-bus kind of existence that goes on without ever crossing the tracks to the city's elegance and worldly ambitions, moves on its own, without manifestoes or injunctions to stop it.

On a strawberry sundae of a day, all daisies and June sun and pastoral posing by world leaders on the Lancaster House lawn.

Graham looks up It is a still look, and it shuts the door gently on the subject.

At the edge of the cliffs, the wind is a smack, and D-day becomes wildly clear: climbing that cutting edge into the bullets.

The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look.

No one has the right to change Paris, the protesters say, and argue that the city is the patrimony of all mankind.

The public relations warriors fought and lost Monte Carlo's Battle of the Magazine Covers.