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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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Word
Hands
Find
Whole
Squeeze
Trying
Unfortunate
Stay
Head
Brain

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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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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, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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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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What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
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In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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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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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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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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A thing derided is a thing dead a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.
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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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To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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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.
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Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
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Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
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My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.
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