“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.”
Source: Embrace the Night
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Karen Chance51
American writerRelated quotes
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”
Thomas Gold Appleton (1812–1884) American artist
Quoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), ch. 6.
“When good Americans die, they go to Paris"
"Where do bad Americans go?"
"They stay in America”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Act I.
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Context: Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
“[takes a drag of his cigarette] Mmmm mmmm, tastes like steak and potatoes doesn't it? Mmmm.”
Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian
Sane Man (1989)
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician
Holmes attributed the remark "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris" to "one of the wittiest of men". Later writers have attributed the saying to friend and fellow Saturday Club member Thomas Gold Appleton. In 1859, Ralph Waldo Emerson, also a member of that club, recorded in one of his journals, "T. Appleton says, that he thinks all Bostonians, when they die, if they are good, go to Paris." Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (1982), p. 486. Neither sentence has been found in the published writings of Appleton, but the remark may have been made in the presence of Holmes and Emerson. Oscar Wilde used the Holmes version in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), p. 75 (Complete Works, vol. 4, 1923), and A Woman of No Importance (1893), p. 180 (Complete Works, vol. 7, 1923).
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)
Tariq Aziz (1936–2015) Iraqi Foreign Minister under Saddam Hussein
Before the Invasion of Iraq, BBC News (April 24, 2003), "Tariq Aziz in U.S. Custody; New York Moves Closer to Rebuilding at Ground Zero" http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0304/24/se.00.html.