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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“I’ve never been very good at doing what I’m told.
It’s a problem.
Or a reflex. If they say left, I go right. If they say sit, I jump. If they say behave, I get drunk and spend the weekend screwing all three of the Archbishop’s tripled nieces.
They were nice girls. I wonder what they’re doing this Friday?”
― Emma Chase, quote from Royally Matched
“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”
― Tana French, quote from Broken Harbor
“It`s remarkable the truly stupid things people can do because it`s expected of them, or they think it`s expected of them.”
― K.J. Parker, quote from Devices and Desires
“People have told me that a wolf looks right through you. But you know what I realize? That's because a wolf isn't interested in you. It's always hard for humans to accept that we're not the most important thing anyone's ever seen.”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
“did tell him. I suppose he thought it wasn’t suitable for your ears.” I swallowed. “What happened then?” “Rose’s boy got caught with the Resistance. They shipped him off, who knows where. Half of Paris was disappearing overnight. Rose probably would have too—she’d already nearly been arrested for kicking a Brownshirt on the Rue de Rivoli, so we brought her back here to Rouen. But . . .”
― Kate Quinn, quote from The Alice Network
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