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"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."

"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."

"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."

"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

"The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten."

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."

"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."

"I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific."
Explore more quotes by Gustave Flaubert

"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."

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him."

"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."

"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."

"The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest."
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