"Madame Bovary is myself."
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Gustave Flaubert quotes (page 11 of 15)
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"In her enthusiasms she had always looked for something tangible: she had always loved church for its flowers, music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir the passions and she rebelled before the mysteries of faith just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature."
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"Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others."
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"He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides"
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"And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate."
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"Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid."
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"Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books."
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"What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support."
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"What is the beautiful, if not the impossible."
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"He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him."
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"That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust."
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"Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar."
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"I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world."
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"One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness."
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"We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!"
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"You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception."
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"Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom."
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"There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more"
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"Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders."
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"What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you."
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