Quotes from Gustave Flaubert’s Madam Bovary


“Love, she felt, ought to come all at once, with great thunderclaps and flashes of lightning; it was like a storm bursting upon life from the sky, uprooting it, overwhelming the will and sweeping the heart into the abyss. It did not occur to her that rain forms puddles on a flat roof when the drainpipes are clogged, and she would have continued to feel secure is she had not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall.”

“ . . . since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.”

“But disparaging those we love always detaches us from them to some extent. It is better not to touch our idols; the gilt comes off on our hands.”

“Why was life so unsatisfying? . . . But if somewhere there existed a strong, handsome man with a valorous, passionate and refined nature, a poet’s soul in the form of an angel, a lyre with strings of bronze intoning elegiac nuptial songs to the heavens, why was it not possible that she might meet him some day?”

“ . . .for of all the winds that blow on love, none is so chilling and destructive as a request for money.”