Quote

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.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Coming
Started
Stylistic
Head
Itching
Suffering
Sentences
Keep
Suffer
Without
Findings
Hard
Finding
Novel

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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
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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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And he beholds the moon like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.
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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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The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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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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The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
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I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all
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It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.
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Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
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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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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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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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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
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Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
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A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
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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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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
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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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One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
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