The Riviera House Quotes
"I promise you'll have a croissant for breakfast tomorrow. But only if you get dressed for school and let Angélique do your hair."
"Yolande just wants to be loved. Hug her. Then she'll behave."
"Everything suffers when power and money are put in front of avaricious men."
"I can’t keep kissing you, Éliane. It’s too good."
"You’re the most unselfish person I’ve ever met."
"I want to believe it’s a promise. That war won’t come, and nobody will die."
"They should have taken the children to the châteaux and the abbeys to keep them safe. Not the artworks."
"For what you did to my family, I will find a way to make you burn in hell."
"I’m joining de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. I’m not a painter anymore."
"That’s part of why I love you. You’re the most unselfish person I’ve ever met."
"Thank you for my assistant. You are very kind."
"I think perhaps the place of the devil is now Paris."
"Ask no more, and you can’t get into trouble."
"We have important guests arriving soon who want to see an exhibition, not a mess."
"No matter what happens, I’ll always be able to find you."
"Brûle en enfer, Monsieur Adolf. For what you did to my family, I will find a way to make you burn in hell."
"I’ll send you money enough to buy lots of ice cream."
"She realized she had closed her eyes, as if she were dreaming of the most grandiose pleasures."
"The world, and the people of Paris, had need of their art."
"No, Angélique," she said resolutely. "I’m working against the Nazis."
"But if the paintings were leaving—where were they going?"
"And it wouldn’t be so bad, living with a little hope."
"She hadn’t meant to say that last sentence; hadn’t meant to admit that his running away to England on the same night he’d made love to her, and her shocking discovery of his traitorous relationship with the Nazis meant anything at all to her."
"She opened her eyes and turned her attention to the painless and uncomplicated act of serving refreshments."
"I hope it's more useful than giving it away."
"I think women are usually more beautiful from their mid-thirties onwards. They know more, have felt more, and you can see it in their faces. Young faces are mostly really blank."
"It’s like someone has kicked you in the balls," he said sharply. "And then the guts. And then the head. And then done it all over again, every damn minute of every damn day, but harder each time in case you ever start to not feel it. Which you never do."
"I wanted those hours back so badly—I still do. I wanted to undo everything. My life, myself."
"That’s a very apt description," she said softly. "Apart from the balls, which I obviously don’t have."
"Family can be both the best thing and the worst thing."
"It’s like looking down at her left ring finger and seeing that it was all tanned now, that there was no longer a white band tattooed into the skin where her wedding ring had once sat."
"I think a wine after every meltdown isn’t the best idea."
"We’ll have some Bordeaux. One that’s at least ten years old."
"Even if someone does come back from lunch unexpectedly, they’ll walk right past me. Whereas you’re apt to be noticed."
"I’ll move the painting and you’ll keep watch."
"We’re using your physical advantages with König, then we’ll use my physical disadvantages for everything else."
"We might as well burn some of the ration coupons for heat."
"A country is much more than a collection of people."
"You spend as much time looking at apparently beautiful women in various states of undress as I do and you become almost immune to the naked female body."
"It’s not going to go away if you ignore it. It’ll just be a different kind of bad thing that will drive you nuts: not knowing, but worrying over it anyway."
"I had no real idea, until I saw The Göring Catalogue, that so much art was stolen."
"It’s like I have to acknowledge that they won’t ever come back. Like I’d somehow, stupidly, been expecting them to."
"The only way to bring it back down to a size small enough that it could finally be destroyed was to swallow, to wait for the tears to pass, to open her eyes and to speak."
"I can do this all the way to Paris if that’s what it takes."
"I’m obsessed with art theft and forgery in a way that other people are obsessed with puppies and yoga."
"I love you, Xavier. More than anything on this earth. Which means you cannot, ever, do anything as reckless as this again."
"We need to keep alive the things that keep us alive."
"You can’t always help the hurts that come from human interactions."
"Love is watching me go and saying nothing, doing nothing because, if you do, they’ll take you too."
"If I could go back and undo everything that happened to you, I would."
"They want money, of course. They think that gives them the power they’ve lost or have never had."
"How am I to choose between one or the other? Between a man I’ve known for twenty-five years and a child I’ve known for five months. If I don’t give König the baby, Luc dies. If I do give König the baby, they both live. Two lives saved, rather than one."
"It was the only way I could be sure that König wouldn’t somehow get his hands on everything."
"Every moment with him, let me hold him for as long as I can."
"I’ve almost convinced myself that, later, Alexandre will understand why I didn’t leave. Do you think he will?"
"Nothing lasts forever. But for some time yet."
"You can’t force a child’s love. They give it, and they give it utterly and completely."
"Art reminds us that there’s a world opposite to this one we live in."
"If Art is the daughter of freedom then our love is the antecedent of it all."
"It's like a wildness, a savage instinct to do whatever I can for him."
"My entire history is a succession of the most unforgivable wrongs."
"The only way not to hurt is to not be around."
"Actions like this mean the Nazis are worried. The Allies must be winning at Normandy. They’re coming, surely."
"We were all connected by something beyond ourselves."
"Let me get you out," he said. "You and Alexandre."