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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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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Precise
Everything
Imperfect
Perfectly
Poetry
Literature
Sure
Invents
True
Geometry
May

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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
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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.)
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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
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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.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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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.
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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Talent is a long patience.
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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
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… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
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[The artist] is like a pump he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
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As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
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