Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

— Gustave Flaubert

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

— Gustave Flaubert

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

— Gustave Flaubert

Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are too born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.

— Gustave Flaubert

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

— Gustave Flaubert

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

— Gustave Flaubert

And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner.

— Gustave Flaubert

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

— Gustave Flaubert

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

— Gustave Flaubert

...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.

— Gustave Flaubert