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One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Happiness
Apple
Women
Apples
Love
France
Life
Trees
Sun
Tree
Oranges
Asks
Mustn
Literature
Orange

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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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To be simple is no small matter.
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
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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?
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
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I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
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It seems to me... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
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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.
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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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I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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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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One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
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