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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Oppresses
Vent
Imagine
Art
Giving
Life
Exorcise

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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
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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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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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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 don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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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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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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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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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
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Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
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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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I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
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And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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