#madame

Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses ; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là ; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres ; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#love #madame-bovary #love

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#keyboard #love #madame-bovary #music #piano

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken. ↗

— Lauren DeStefano

#corrupt #evil #gems #hate #hide

Will you, then, never grow weary of being unjust? ↗

— Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

#affection #behavior #conduct #feelings #love

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#characters #fiction #imagination #madame-bovary #reading

Entering by the carré, a piece of mirror- glass, set in an oaken cabinet, repeated my image. It said I was changed: my cheeks and lips were sodden white, my eyes were glassy, and my eyelids swollen and purple. On rejoining my companions, I knew they all looked at me - my heart seemed discovered to them: I believed myself self-betrayed. Hideously certain did it seem that the very youngest of the school must guess why and for whom I despaired. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#lucy-snowe #madame-beck #paul-emmanuel #unmarriageble #villette

The world is full of stupid people. That's why we have rules. But with enough intelligence, a person can be above the rules. She can make rules. ↗

— Daniel Nayeri

#madame-vileroy #rules #intelligence

The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#love #madame-bovary #quotes #love

You should wait, William," Miss Frost said. "The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences. ↗

— John Irving

#relationship

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#madame-bovary #music #speech #love