Quote #50

At last she was going to know the joys of love, the fever of the happiness she had despaired of. She was entering a marvelous realm where all would be passion, ecstasy, rapture: she was in the midst of an endless blue expanse, scaling the glittering heights of passion; everyday life had receded, and lay far below, in the shadows between those peaks.

More from Gustave Flaubert

  1. Never had her eyes been so enormous, so dark, so deep: her whole being was transfigured by some subtle emanation.
  2. How happy she had been in those days! How free! How full of hope! How rich in illusions! There were no illusions left now. She had had to p…
  3. Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful -- not to accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.
  4. It was for him that she had done it -- for this creature here, this man who understood nothing, who felt nothing.
  5. 'Do you really not know,' he said, 'that there exist souls that are ceaselessly in torment? That are driven now to dreams, now to action, d…
  6. She repented her virtue of days past as though it had been a crime; and what virtue she had left now crumbled under the furious assault of …
  7. And they talked about the mediocrity of provincial life, so suffocating, so fatal to all noble dreams.
  8. He saw no reason why there should be all this to-do about so simple a thing as love-making.

All Gustave Flaubert quotes