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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Though
Hate
Even
Realism
Made
Priests
Decided
High
Literature
Call

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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
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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.
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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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One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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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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Everything is there: the love of Art.
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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
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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.
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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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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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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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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
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The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.
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You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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