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Gustave Flaubert

"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."

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"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."

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Donna Grant

"Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work."

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Donna Grant

"It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness."

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Donna Grant

"You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition."

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Donna Grant

"Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly."

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Donna Grant

"Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it."

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Donna Grant

"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."

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Donna Grant

"We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time."

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Donna Grant

"With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken-formerly it was only the prominent-and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait."

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Donna Grant

"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."

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Donna Grant

"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."

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"Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal."
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"Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom."
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"I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key."
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"Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution."
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Gustave Flaubert
"The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family."
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Gustave Flaubert
"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."
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"I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly."
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Gustave Flaubert
"Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying."
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Gustave Flaubert
"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."
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"It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs."
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