Gustave Flaubert · 230 pages
Rating: (338 votes)
“It 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 from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
“This is indeed a funny country. Yesterday, for example, we were in a cafe which is one of the best in Cairo, and there were, at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting, and a gentleman who was pissing in a corner. No one finds that odd; no one says anything.”
― Gustave Flaubert, quote from Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Gustave Flaubert
Born place: in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, France
Born date December 12, 1821
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“TAL HAD TO laugh. Hardly presentable! Wasn’t it strange, the way humans looked at themselves with eyes of flesh and not of the Spirit? Certainly that dear woman had been through mire and filth of every degree; she was scarred, exhausted, ragged, and dirty. But to the angels, she appeared as God Himself saw her, just as any other redeemed saint of the living God: pure, shining, clean, dressed in garments as white as snow.”
― Frank E. Peretti, quote from Piercing the Darkness
“Shouldn't you know what love's like, before you begin renouncin' it"
George Cooper”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from In the Hand of the Goddess
“What you are doesn't matter. Because what you are isn't going to change who you are.”
― C.C. Hunter, quote from Awake at Dawn
“Hip - Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands "jive talk." Someone who is "with it." The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't "dig" what it means, no one can ever tell you.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from Junky
“He froze. “I . . .” Then, as he searched my face with wonder, he slid from his seat and down to one knee. “My sweet, lovely Anna. I love you . . . and I want to marry you. But only if you want to. Do you? I mean, will you? Marry me?”
Be still my heart. His proposal was so adorably awkward that I had to laugh, sliding out of my chair so I could face him on my knees, too. I grabbed his face and kissed him for saying exactly what I needed to hear. We kissed once, twice, three times before he pulled back.
“Does it always take this long for someone to answer? It’s making me bloody nervous.”
I looked into his eyes. “Yes, Kai. I’ll marry you.”
― Wendy Higgins, quote from Sweet Reckoning
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