Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides
Talent is long patience.
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.
I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.
The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves.
For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.
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.
To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
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?
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.
A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.
I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
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