Quotes About Flaubert

Curtius cierra así su comparación: «Balzac siente un ardiente interés por la vida y nos contagia su fuego; Flaubert, su náusea». Así es, y ésa es precisamente la razón por la que Flaubert es el primer novelista moderno.

The monologue is her form of revenge. FLAUBERT

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".

The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He's looking away so that you can't catch his eye; he's also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am, he told Morgan, an unhappy man -

I like what Flaubert once wrote. History is prophecy, looking backwards.

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!

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

sorrow rushed into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in abandoned manor houses.

Why, like all men, she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement - You are all evil!

Surely it could not have been a dove God had chosen to speak through, since doves could not talk.

What's improper about it?" retorted the clerk. "Everybody does it in Paris!" It was an irresistible and conclusive argument.

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

A man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive.

I understand, said the notary; a man of science can't be worried with the practical details of life.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences.

The more flowery a person's speech … the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.

Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre. » CHAMFORT. Maximes et pensées

fallait évoquer l'image de Rosanette ou de Mme Arnoux. Cette atrophie sentimentale lui laissait la tête entièrement libre

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

Café. Donne de l'esprit. N'est bon qu'en venant du Havre. Dans un grand dîner, doit se prendre debout. L'avaler sans sucre, très chic, donne l'air d'avoir vécu en Orient.

Colonies (nos). S'attrister quand on en parle.