Quote #84

He wasn't lying. If he had had it he would probably have given it to her, unpleasant though it usually is to make such generous gifts: of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

More from Gustave Flaubert

  1. She looked at him sadly. 'Whatever it was,' she said, 'I suffered a great deal.' He answered philosophically: 'Existence is thus!'
  2. And in his eyes she read a love such as she had never known.
  3. Adultery, Emma was discovering, could be as banal as marriage.
  4. First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous sce…
  5. There isn't a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn't thought himself capable of boundle…
  6. The wind blew very hard that day / And snatched her petticoat away!
  7. No matter: she wasn't happy, and never had been. Why was life so unsatisfactory? Why did everything she leaned on crumble instantly to dust…
  8. Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

All Gustave Flaubert quotes