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Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert
Age: 58 †
Born: 1821
Born: December 12
Died: 1880
Died: May 8
Novelist
Writer
Flaubert
Balls
Lead
Playing
Book
Writing
Men
Knuckles
Like
Attached
Piano

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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.
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What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
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May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
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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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As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
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Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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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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(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.
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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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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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I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
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The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
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What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.
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Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.
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How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.
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You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything
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By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
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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 writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
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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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