"How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis."

"There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things."

"It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs."

"There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more."

"The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love."

"One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!"

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

"The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet."

"And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors."

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."

"He was savoring for the first time the ineffable subtleties of feminine refinement. Never had he encountered this grace of language, this quiet taste in dress, these relaxed, dove like postures. He marveled at the sublimity of her soul and at the lace on her petticoat. With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books."

"All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry."

"You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it."

"I'm no more modern than ancient, no more French than Chinese, and the idea of a native country, that is to say, the imperative to live on one bit of ground marked red or blue on the map and to hate the other bits in green or black, has always seemed to me narrow-minded, blinkered and profoundly stupid. I am a soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man."

"Read in oreder to live."

"And he beholds the moon, like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light."

"Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books."

"The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts."

"Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her-the opportunity, the courage."

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."

"Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away."

"Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal."

"I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony."

"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?"

"His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner."

"We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity. I think that's what being really human means."

"It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough to actually to father them."

"Of all lies, art is the least untrue."

"There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me, the one around me will crush me."

"How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps."

"In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up."

"He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides."

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

"At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing - is it not? - is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice."

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

"Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom."

"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."

"As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature's greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back."

"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."

"Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion."

"I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within."

"A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies."

"The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it."

"He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish."

"I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something " the eternal 'what's the use?' " sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis."

"Has it ever happened to you," León went on, "to come across some vague idea of your own in a book, some dim image that reaches you from afar, and appears as the fullest expression of your own slightest sentiment?"

"I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key."

"He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height."

"Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry."