Quote

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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Written
Banks
Understand
Pens
Ends
Slowly
Stories
Drop
Dazzled
Thought
Six
Spills
Much
Ten
Rubbish
Like
Flow
Facility
Days
Flows

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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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But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.
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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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Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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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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Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.
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It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
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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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Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
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DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
Gustave Flaubert
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How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
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You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
Gustave Flaubert
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Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
Gustave Flaubert