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

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Beautiful
Thing
Miss
Memory
Missing
Memories
Almost
Literature
Desire

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Gustave Flaubert
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What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
Gustave Flaubert
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
Gustave Flaubert
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Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
Gustave Flaubert
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Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
Gustave Flaubert
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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Gustave Flaubert
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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Gustave Flaubert
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
Gustave Flaubert
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
Gustave Flaubert
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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.
Gustave Flaubert
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I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Gustave Flaubert
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Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
Gustave Flaubert
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In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Gustave Flaubert
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
Gustave Flaubert
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
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DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)
Gustave Flaubert
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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 toe.
Gustave Flaubert
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Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
Gustave Flaubert