Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubertwas an influential French novelist who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary, for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 December 1821
CityRouen, France
CountryFrance
As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint .... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?
Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'
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 buring?
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.