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"Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again."
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"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."

"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."

"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."

"My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose."

"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."

"We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle."

"The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."

"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

"Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others."

"Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature."

"One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us."
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