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
Fingers
Ears
Whose
Violinist
Within
Reproduce
Sound
Irritated
True
Hears
Writing
Precisely
Like
Refuse

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The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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Talent is a long patience.
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Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
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I have dreamed much and have done very little.
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You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.
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I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
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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.
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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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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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What an elder sees sitting the young can't see standing.
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Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
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For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
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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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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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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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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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