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.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Never touch your idols: the gildings will stick to your fingers.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
It's always depressing when you're caught out in a lie.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
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.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Sometimes, he said to himself, 'What a pity she wasn't more intelligent!' It seemed to him that her beauty was handicapped by her wit, and that her incomparable physical qualities were crying out for a better intellect.Charles Bovary, Madame Bovary
And yet, in the immensity of this future that she conjured for herself, nothing specific stood out: the days, each one magnificent, were as near alike as waves are.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
There was something both terrifying and comical about him, something pathetic and admirable, a rather vulgar curiosity and a quasi-artistic lecherousness, a taste for the unconventional and a bending to sheer bourgeois respectability -- everything in him clashed, and the result was fearful.Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
If anyone had asked what she wanted to become, she would have replied, without any hesitation at all, 'To be rich!'Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him? She asked herself. He is weak, spineless, mediocre, pathetically diminutive!Emma Bovary, Madame Bovary