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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
Head
Brain
Word
Hands
Find
Whole
Squeeze
Trying
Unfortunate
Stay

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Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
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A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
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My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else's - monotonous, sensible, stupid.
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What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
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And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
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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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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
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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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Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.
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Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.
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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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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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Talent is a long patience.
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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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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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Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
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Beautiful things spoil nothing.
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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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