Nouveau N Quotes & Sayings

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing. — Manuel Puig

Codfish aristocracy' is what they call us. Men who've made a fortune in business, but are common-born."
"Why codfish?"
"It used to refer to the rich merchants who settled the American colonies and made their money in the cod trade. Now it means any successful businessman."
"Nouveau riche is another term," Helen added. "It's never used as a compliment, of course. But it should be. Being self-made is something to be admired." As she felt his soundless chuckle, she insisted, "It is."
Rhys turned his head to kiss her. "You've no need to flatter my vanity."
"I'm not flattering you. I think you're remarkable. — Lisa Kleypas

Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all. — Michel Houellebecq

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills. — Margaret Atwood

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. — Salvador Dali

Floridians have accustomed themselves to this nasty vermin [the cockroach] as just another of the Sunshine State's rogue inhabitants, not so different from its serial killers, native shit-kickers, oblivious tourists, faux-mermaids, cocaine kingpins, moron surfers, nouveau-riche snowbirds, spooky clairvoyants and Jimmy Buffet wanna-be's. — Jon Resh

The scientific community having made a rapid ascent from deep poverty to great affluence, from academe's cloisters to Washington's high councils, still tends to be a bit excitable - not unlike a nouveau riche in a fluctuating market. — Daniel S. Greenberg

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say. — Peter Sloterdijk

I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I'm still living in one! ... The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs
all the old clubs
are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today ... Where is this 'vanished world' they talk about? I don't think the critics have looked out the window! — Louis Auchincloss

The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative. — Susan Sontag

Japonisme was a vertical phenomenon running through a number of successive styles; Art Nouveau was a horizontal, chronologically limited phenomenon that embodied the aim of giving expression to a new experience of life. — Klaus Berger

I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work. — H.R. Giger

Art Nouveau got its inspiration from nature. The Bauhaus got its inspiration from engineering. — P. J. O'Rourke

Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism. — Bryant McGill

The show I did in England catered to a broad range of people. I like that. I don't want nouveau cult status, though I know we've got that sort of audience in the states. — Tracey Ullman

What reader or dreamer doesn't imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the time to read? — Rawi Hage

Domenico had that 'look-at-me I've-got-money' attitude about him. A proper nouveau riche. In combination with his pig-like table manners at home, it was a sight to behold. — K.A. Merikan

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist. — Saul Bellow

It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would-and did-detest. 'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon arrival. — Gillian Flynn

I have this table in my new house. They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked. I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through. — Kanye West

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all. — Gore Vidal

Gilded palace of Flying Burritos
Excellent Nouveau Mexican Cuisine
We all got to wear Swank-Ass Nudie Suits
I should have known it was a lousy pipe dream
Ohhh, Ohhh, what an awesome job
Ohhh, Ohhh, what do I do now??
Ohh, Ohhhhh, it's like I've been robbed
Spent the last of my paycheque
And I'm feelin' pretty downnnnn!! — Bryan Lee O'Malley

I've just written out the death certificate,' the doctor said cheerfully. 'Natural causes of course. She was eighty-eight. I think it was the Beaujolais Nouveau, I warned her not to drink it after Christmas but she was always stubborn. I'll send the undertakers around later. But they won't be able to fit her for at least a couple of days. She'll be all right there as long as it doesn't get too hot. — Philippa Gregory

Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all fuure living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude. — Hal Foster

I think Nouveau Gloaming is a classic black metal record and I would hate to be a band that kept trying to recapture the same essence, but failing, for the rest of its days. — Mat McNerney

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails. — Janet Fitch

A big diamond necklace is nouveau riche, really. People who have wealth a long time don't wear such things. — Elsa Peretti

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du NOUVEAU! (rough translation : Into the abyss
Heaven or Hell, what difference does it make? / To the depths of the Unknown to find the NEW!) — Charles Baudelaire

We must stop calling our drug barons and "419s" (fraudsters) nouveau riche, big shots or those who have made it. — Sunday Adelaja

The assumption being that if high-risk children could be made to 'feel good about themselves,' these epidemics could be mitigated ... This prescription, unfortunately, has proven to be yet another in a long list of nouveau homilies that haven't lived up to their promises. — John Rosemond