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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Never
Return
Leave
Place
Always

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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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Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
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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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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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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
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Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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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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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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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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… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
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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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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
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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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Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
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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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Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
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