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One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Tables
Bits
Shall
Found
Artillery
Writing
Explode
Like
Shell
Shells
Table

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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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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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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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Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
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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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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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It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
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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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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
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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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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
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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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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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