Quotes from Gustave Flaubert

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 of being annoyed.

Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

The next day was, for Emma, a dismal one. Everything seemed enveloped in a black atmosphere that hovered indistinctly over the exterior of things, and sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses. It was the sort of reverie you sink into over something that will never return again, the lassitude that overcomes you with each thing that is finished, the pain you suffer when any habitual motion is stopped, when a prolonged vibration abruptly ceases.

But how nothingness invades us! We are scarcely born ere decay begins for us, in such a way that the whole of life is but one long combat with it, more and more triumphant, on its part, to the consummation, namely, death; and then the reign of decay is exclusive.

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?

How did you expect me to live without you? Once you've known happiness it's impossible to get used to not having it. I was desperate! I thought I should die! I'll tell you all about it, you'll see... And you-- you stayed away from me!' He had been carefully avoiding her for the past three years, out of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex; and Emma went on, moving her head in winsome little gestures, more affectionate than an amorous cat.

Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady's album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

Cheer up,' said the captain's son. 'Life is long, and we are young.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

No one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.

Without moving, you walk through lands you imagine you can see, and your thoughts, weaving in and out of the story, delight in the details or follow the outlines of the adventures. You merge with the character; you think you're the one whose heart is beating so hard within the clothes he's wearing.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.

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.

Era la enamorada de todas las novelas, la heroína de todos los dramas, la vaga ella de todos los libros de versos.

I'd like to be in love like this description, wouldn't you? ...they moved among the carriages, the crowds, the noise, oblivious of everything but themselves, hearing nothing, as if they had been walking together in the country on a bed of dead leaves.

People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.

She only wished to lean on something more solid than love.

This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.