Top 100 Quotes About Flaubert
#2. In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it ... a wild book.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#3. Flaubert's famous sentence, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary, she is me"), in reality means, " Madame Bovary, c'est nous" ("Madame Bovary, she is us"), in our modern incapacity to live a "good-enough" life.
Sophie Barthes
#4. I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing".
Emil Cioran
#5. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.
Dai Sijie
#6. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#7. I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.
Julian Barnes
#8. Life direct ... is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.
Marvin Mudrick
#9. Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am," he told Morgan, "an unhappy man -
Mary Doria Russell
#10. Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?
Julian Barnes
#11. Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer. [1857]
Le Figaro
#12. I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Mary Oliver
#13. [Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
Julian Barnes
#15. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#16. How were you supposed to feel when you adored the novels of Jules Verne, Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Simenon and loads of others who then turned out to be complete bastards?
Jean-Michel Guenassia
#17. John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
Jonathan Dee
#18. I say novelist, not writer. The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work.
Milan Kundera
#19. I like reading ... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
Andrea Bocelli
#20. Be selfish, stupid and have good health. But if stupidity is lacking, then all is lost.
Flaubert's dictum for getting through life unscathed.
Gustave Flaubert
#21. In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
Manuel Puig
#22. Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche.
Sophie Barthes
#23. Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.
Christopher Hitchens
#24. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.'
Alain Resnais
#25. Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted.
Edna O'Brien
#26. As Baudelaire said it so beautifully, Emma Bovary is an androgynous character. She cannot be reduced to a gender or a sociological type. She represents something bigger than herself. That was the genius of Flaubert: the ability to combine the general and the particular.
Sophie Barthes
#27. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
Dorothy Parker
#29. The power of 'Madame Bovary' stems from Flaubert's determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes.
Kathryn Harrison
#30. In Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:
Alain De Botton
#31. I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse's elite salon in Flaubert's Sentimental Education - a
Chris Kraus
#32. The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-It on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it.
Helen Simpson
#33. The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.
Alain De Botton
#34. DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
#35. It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: Close the window, it's too beautiful.
Albert Camus
#36. To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Gustave Flaubert
#37. In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed.
Gustave Flaubert
#38. The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.
Gustave Flaubert
#39. Sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.
Gustave Flaubert
#40. The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
Gustave Flaubert
#41. If you want to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent.
Gustave Flaubert
#42. Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.
Gustave Flaubert
#43. Why was it? Who drove you to it?'
She replied, 'It had to be, my dear!'
'Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!'
'Yes, that is true - you are good - you.
Gustave Flaubert
#46. The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror
Gustave Flaubert
#48. A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Gustave Flaubert
#49. It seemed to her that certain parts of the world must produce happiness as they produced peculiar plants which will flourish nowhere else.
Gustave Flaubert
#50. The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
Gustave Flaubert
#51. His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb.
Gustave Flaubert
#52. It seems to me ... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions ... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
#54. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)
Gustave Flaubert
#55. After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Gustave Flaubert
#56. [The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
Gustave Flaubert
#58. Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?
Gustave Flaubert
#60. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
Gustave Flaubert
#63. Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.
Gustave Flaubert
#64. What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
Gustave Flaubert
#65. Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.
Gustave Flaubert
#66. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.
Gustave Flaubert
#67. There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.
Gustave Flaubert
#68. He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
Gustave Flaubert
#69. And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?
Gustave Flaubert
#70. Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
Gustave Flaubert
#71. Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again.
Gustave Flaubert
#73. It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
Gustave Flaubert
#74. There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert
#75. How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.
Gustave Flaubert
#77. And he was beginning to feel that discouragement which is engendered by a life of repetition, when no interest guides nor expectation sustains it.
Gustave Flaubert
#78. But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows.
Gustave Flaubert
#79. Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Gustave Flaubert
#82. Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?
Gustave Flaubert
#83. Happy are they whose pens fly across the page; I myself hesitate, I falter. I become angry and fearful. My drive diminishes as my taste improves. I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well proportioned paragraph.
Gustave Flaubert
#85. Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
#86. I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.
Gustave Flaubert
#89. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,
a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
Gustave Flaubert
#90. The mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the idea?
Gustave Flaubert
#91. But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.
Gustave Flaubert
#93. Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
Gustave Flaubert
#94. I feel waves of hatred against the stupidity of my era suffocating me. Shit is rising into my mouth , as with a strangulated hernia
Flaubert
#95. Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
Gustave Flaubert
#96. Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
Gustave Flaubert
#97. Man is nothing but a coagulation of mud and shit ... equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or crab-louse
Flaubert
#98. Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul's possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level
Gustave Flaubert
#99. My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
Gustave Flaubert
#100. Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.
Gustave Flaubert
