Quote

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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Within
Reproduce
Sound
Irritated
True
Hears
Writing
Precisely
Like
Refuse
Fingers
Ears
Whose
Violinist

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
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As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
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All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.
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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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For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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Antiquite . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche d and boring.
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I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
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To be simple is no small matter.
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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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It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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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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On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
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Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Gustave Flaubert