"Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker."

"Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity."

"On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down below, on the sidewalk, no one. This spreading silence increased the tranquility of things. In the distance, the caulkers' hammers tamped the hulls, and a heavy breeze brought the smell of tar."

"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."

"Sometimes, in a daze, they completely dismantled the cadaver, then found themselves hard put to it to fit the pieces together again."

"Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting."

"This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain."

"The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect."

"A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man."

"I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings."

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

"She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage."

"The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We're lucky to be living now."

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it."

"Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force."

"When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds " like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow."

"And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway, on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness, like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance of the truffles he has eaten for dinner."

"Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest " disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."

"The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel."

"A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss."

"I have patience in all things " as far as the antechamber."

"With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady's album " and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say."

"Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant."

"Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss, "passion, and "rapture - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

"Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall."

"One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness."

"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."

"Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can't stiffen up enough to create them."

"So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!"

"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. 'I don't want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don't see what use he is."

"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."

"The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that 'black hole' is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions-nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur."

"Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it."

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

"Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings."

"It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes."

"A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous."

"One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form."

"On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters."

"Irony takes nothing away from pathos."

"Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in."

"Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living."

"But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands."

"I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world."

"Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank..."

"One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table."

"How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?"

"Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins."

"For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries."

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