Gustave Flaubert - Book Quotes

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An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

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

Gustave Flaubert
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

Gustave Flaubert
Books are made not like children but like pyramids…and they're just as useless! and they stay in the desert!…Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

Gustave Flaubert
And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

Gustave Flaubert
Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and rapture - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Gustave Flaubert
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?

Gustave Flaubert
Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

Gustave Flaubert
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague she of all the poetry books.

Gustave Flaubert
What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.

Gustave Flaubert
They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.

Gustave Flaubert