Gustave Flaubert Quotes

238 quotes in 2729 categories

• Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
• Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar -…
• Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
• That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
• Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint .... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
• My God, this novel makes me break out in a cold sweat! Do you know how much I've written in five months, since the end…
• May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
• Talent is long patience.
• It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.
• Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective…
• 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…
• I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
• I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of…
• We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!
• Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
• A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be…
• If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!
• Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.
• I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one…
• A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

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