Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

— Gustave Flaubert

But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart.

— Gustave Flaubert

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

— Gustave Flaubert

...but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house.

— Gustave Flaubert

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

— Gustave Flaubert

But 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

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

— Gustave Flaubert

Charles went to kiss her shoulder.-Leave me alone! She said, you're creasing my dress.

— Gustave Flaubert

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

— Gustave Flaubert

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

— Gustave Flaubert