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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
Stay
Head
Brain
Word
Hands
Find
Whole
Squeeze
Trying
Unfortunate

More quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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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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Life must be a constant education one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.
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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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DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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I don't believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.
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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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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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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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I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
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Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.
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I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter
Gustave Flaubert
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For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.
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La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe le o u' nous battons des me lodies a' faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.
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