Quotes About Madame Bovary

Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That's why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn't dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

ilusión de sintetizar lo real, de resumir la vida. Ese apetito debió verse plenamente colmado con Madame Bovary, ejemplo de obra clausurada, de libro-círculo.

I have a boundless passion for Flaubert. It's unthinkable to me that someone might not have read 'Madame Bovary.' He writes with a scalpel. Everything has meaning. My students were not allowed not to like him!

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?

Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It's very boring to talk about winners. The real literature always talks about losers. Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance

She [Madame Bovary] had that indefinable beauty that comes from happiness, enthusiasm, success—a beauty that is nothing more or less than a harmony of temperament and circumstances.

The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.

You should wait, William, Miss Frost said. The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.