Quotes from work

Madame Bovary

“Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.”

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

“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.”

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

“What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.”

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

“Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.”

“After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.”

“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

“for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.”

“Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening - a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.”

“The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

“He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.”

“She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.”

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”

“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?”

“For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”

“Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?”

“She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.”