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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
Whole
Squeeze
Trying
Unfortunate
Stay
Head
Brain
Word
Hands
Find

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Prose is like hair it shines with combing.
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Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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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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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
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The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
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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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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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Mediocrity cherishes rules as for me, I hate them I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.
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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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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height
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You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.
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The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
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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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I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
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A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
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Years passed and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
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