Gustave Flaubert

He did his little daily task like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing.

Never before had he seen more lustrous dark skin, a more seductive figure, or more delicately shaped fingers than those through which the sunlight gleamed.

Suddenly they heard a plaintive song, a song loud and soft, rising and falling in the air like the wing-beating of a wounded bird.

At night, in winter, when the snowflakes fall slowly from heaven like great white tears, I raise my voice; its resonance thrills the cypress trees and makes them bud anew.

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself with not loving her.

The universe had suddenly become enlarged. She was the luminous point towards which all things converged

Everything stirred in a diffusion of red, for the god, as if he were rending himself, now poured full-rayed upon Carthage the golden rain of his veins.

Thou shalt seek sleep, because eternal life is torture, and the tomb is peace.

Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought.

They sank into his soul like metals falling into a furnace, added to his passion, and supplied the material of love.

And yet between us there are, as it were, the invisible billows of a boundless ocean!

Die! I have scarce begun to live!

But she⁠—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

“Well,” said he, colouring, “for my part, I would like to love the same one always!”

When thou appearest, quietness is spread abroad upon the earth; the flowers close, the waves are soothed, wearied man stretches his breast toward thee, and the world with its oceans and mountains looks at itself in thy face as in a mirror.

The persistence of its life irritated the boy.

She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.

He envied pianists for their talents and soldiers for their scars.

Before the gods darkness alone was, and a breathing stirred dull and indistinct as the conscience of a man in a dream.

“Accursed! Accursed! Accursed! some day, ferocious soul, thou wilt murder thy father and thy mother!”