5 Gustave Flaubert Quotes on Reality

Gustave Flaubert quotes on reality

19. Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words 'bliss,' 'passion,' and 'rapture' -- words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

22. And now she could not bring herself to believe that the uneventful life she was leading was the happiness of which she had dreamed.

58. But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled -- inevitably -- it's the way with everything human.

81. 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 boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary's heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

82. Adultery, Emma was discovering, could be as banal as marriage.