01UndatedHave you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank...Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
03UndatedHe 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.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
04UndatedIndeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
05UndatedThen he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
06UndatedTravel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
07UndatedIt is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
08UndatedTravel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization’s sadnesses.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
09UndatedPerhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
10UndatedAt last she sighed."But the most wretched thing — is it not? — is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
11UndatedSelf-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
12UndatedYet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
13UndatedShe wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
15UndatedHuman speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
16UndatedFrederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart. © Project Gutenberg /... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul...Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
17UndatedFrederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart./... sentimentele slăbesc cînd le schimbi locul...Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
18UndatedOne thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
19UndatedAnd the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
20UndatedI can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
21UndatedOn days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers’ hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
22UndatedHe had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
23UndatedBut vilifying those we love always detaches us from them a little. We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.Gustave Flaubert / quote ↗
