Quote #51

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 part with some each time she had ventured on a new path, in each of her successive conditions -- as virgin, as wife, as mistress; all along the course of her life she had been losing them, like a traveler leaving a bit of his fortune in every inn along the road.

More from Gustave Flaubert

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  2. It was for him that she had done it -- for this creature here, this man who understood nothing, who felt nothing.
  3. Never had her eyes been so enormous, so dark, so deep: her whole being was transfigured by some subtle emanation.
  4. 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 …
  5. 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.
  6. He saw no reason why there should be all this to-do about so simple a thing as love-making.
  7. '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…
  8. He had had such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and a…

All Gustave Flaubert quotes