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By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Becoming
Risk
Running
Dint
Railing
Idiots
Runs
Idiot
Oneself

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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
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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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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
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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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The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
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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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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.
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I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
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Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.
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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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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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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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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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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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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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