Madame Bovary Quotes

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know. ~ David Lodge

Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche. ~ Sophie Barthes

Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It's very boring to talk about winners. The real literature always talks about losers. Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance ~ Umberto Eco

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Madame Bovary is one my favorite novels. Emma Bovary will always be an enigma, but as the years pass, I feel that I understand her better. She has a violent nostalgia, almost an infantile nostalgia, to be understood by the men surrounding her. I like her relentless fight for independence, her rebellion against the mediocre, and her quest for the sublime, even if she burns her wigs in the process. I like that Flaubert never judges her morally for her self-destructiveness, for her desperate attempt to satisfy her wildest desires and appetites. ~ Sophie Barthes

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim. ~ Kate Zambreno

In this sense, we can render the false meaning of catharsis which occurs in pornography with a different meaning than the catharsis we associate with Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For in the tragedy, we weep, grieve and feel pity. We are brought to feeling, we experience both meaning and sensation at the same time, tremble in our bodies and our souls. Thus we weep over the death of Iphigenia, of Tristan and Iseult, of Madame Bovary. In experiencing these feelings, we have tapped a part of ourselves which had perhaps been quiet for some time. Which indeed, in this stillness, we were not certain was even there. Or had even forgotten. And thus, when we weep at this tragic playing out before our eyes of a drama which touches our hearts, a part of ourselves we had left in shadow comes back to us and is named and is lived. But pornographic catharsis moves from altogether different needs. For, we know, one does not weep over the death of Justine. One does not feel at all. Rather, one experiences only sensation and mastery. If there is a vulnerable part of oneself that would weep, this vulnerability is projected onto the body of a woman who is punished, and is destroyed there. And so we cease, in this projection, to recognize this vulnerability as a part of ourselves. Rather than reclaim a feeling, or own a part of ourselves once more, we disown ourselves. What pornography calls "catharsis" leads to denial and not to knowledge. ~ Susan Griffin

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

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument "whose strings buzzed," and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Proust, who did not greatly admire Flaubert, except perhaps in his narrow sense as a stylist - or perhaps only did not care very much for his work - nevertheless owed him a great deal, without realizing how much. From Flaubert he obtained the art of expressing his characters indirectly, through a monologue interieur. This method of characterization is one of Flaubert's greatest contributions to the art of fiction and, as we have seen in Madame Bovary, it is very different from the direct method of characterization practised by Balzac and Stendhal. ~ Enid Starkie

Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal? ~ Gustave Flaubert

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). ( ... ) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life. ~ Michael Dirda

An interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: Madame Bovary. ~ Joseph McCarthy

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

Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts--it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear, and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857), the sexual reproduction of a sunflower for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, the silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators, and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and nonchalant, as darkness always was. ~ Marisha Pessl

She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (though what they might have been I can't for the moment think)? Put it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie's reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I hope not. My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure. I can't prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget. Dr Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory: the books they teach and write about can never fade from their brains. They become family. Perhaps this is why some critics develop a faintly patronising tone towards their subjects. They act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody's living in it rent free; but even so, surely it is, well, you know…time?
Whereas the common but passionate reader is allowed to forget; he can go away, be unfaithful with other writers, come back and be entranced again. Domesticity ~ Julian Barnes

We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up. ~ Salman Rushdie

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification - for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties. ~ Lydia Davis

In Madame Bovary, Félicité the maid is always scuttling away from some new abuse at the hands of her self-involved mistress. She seeks sweetness as consolation: "since Madame always left the key in the sideboard, Félicité took a small supply of sugar every night and ate it when she was all alone in her bed, after she had said her prayers." How could sugar still be necessary after prayer? It offers salve to the physical body, immediate comfort, something the flesh can trust while the spirit is being patient. Think of the sadness of two women living in the same house, both hungry for stolen increments of different pleasures - text and lust and sugar - both keeping these pleasures secret because they are ashamed to admit their hungers. ~ Leslie Jamison

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent. ~ Andre Breton

When the ship suddenly pitched more steeply, the bookworm lost his grip. He came skipping over the toilet seats - his ass made a slapping sound - until he collided with my father at the opposite end of the row of toilets. "Sorry - I just had to keep reading!" he said. Then the ship rolled in the other direction, and the soldier sallied forth, skipping over the seats again. When he'd slid all the way to the last toilet, he either lost control of the book or he let it go, gripping the toilet seat with both hands. The book floated away in the seawater. "What were you reading?" the code-boy called. "Madame Bovary!" the soldier shouted in the storm. "I can tell you what happens," the sergeant said. "Please don't!" the bookworm answered. "I want to read it for myself! ~ John Irving

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit. ~ Alberto Manguel

Madame Bovary is myself. ~ Gustave Flaubert

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Dear Madame Morgenstern,
As absurd as it sounds, I've been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck ~ Julie Orringer

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it. ~ Madame De Stael

The face of a woman, whatever be the force or extent of her mind, whatever be the importance of the object she pursues, is always an obstacle or a reason in the story of her life. ~ Madame De Stael

Frivolity, under whatever form it appears, deprives attention of its power, thought of its originality, and sentiment of its depth. ~ Madame De Stael

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent. ~ Madame De Stael

The last steps of life are ever slow and difficult. ~ Madame De Stael

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay? ~ Madame De Stael

It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this moment," said Madame Defarge. "Good patriots will know what that means. Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do you hear? ~ Charles Dickens

It is nothing, Marie-Laure. Come now." Marie-Laure backs out. Below her, her great-uncle whispers nursery rhymes to himself. "I can sit with him for a bit, Madame. Maybe we could read some more of our ~ Anthony Doerr

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it. ~ Madame De Stael

Kindness and generosity ... form the true morality of human actions. ~ Madame De Stael

Yes, Madame. The Jews of Frankfort are not allowed to use family names." He looked up and smiled lopsidedly. "For the sake of convenience, the neighbors call us after an old red shield that was painted on the front of our house, many years ago. But beyond that ... no, Madame. We have no name. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Why would you want to help the people who did that to you?" Emerelda asked.
"Because if we want a better world, we have to be better than the world," Madame Weatherberry said. "If we let one experience destroy our faith in an entire species, then we're no better than the people who hurt us. Just like in the magical community, there is good and evil in humanity, and now more than ever, they need to be reminded of the goodness in their hearts. Our pursuit of acceptance could be the example humankind needs to change its ways - it could inspire them to finally value their compassion over their hatred. We could create a new era where the world respects not just us, but those from all walks of life. ~ Chris Colfer

Lord Macon deposited his wife into a chair and then knelt next to her, clutching one of her hands. "Tell me truthfully - how are you feeling?"
Alexia took a breath. "Truthfully? I sometimes wonder if I, like Madame Lefoux, should affect masculine dress."
"Gracious me, why?"
"You mean aside from the issue of greater mobility?"
"My love, I don't think that's currently the result of your clothing."
"Indeed, I mean after the baby."
"I still don't see why should want to."
"Oh no? I dare you to spend a week in a corset, long skirts and a bustle."
"How do you know I haven't? ~ Gail Carriger

Truth and, by consequence, liberty, will always be the chief power of honest men. ~ Madame De Stael

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them. ~ Virginia Woolf

When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue. ~ Madame De Stael

The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs. - Jeanne ~ Madame Roland

Ready?" He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: People have been arrested for less. And Madame Manec: Don't you want to be alive before you die? "Yes. ~ Anthony Doerr

Madame Magloire," retorted the Bishop, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a pause, "More so, perhaps. ~ Victor Hugo

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 V begins the lesson by reading aloud the first stanza of a famous French poem: Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur Qui penetre mon coeur? Then she looks up and without any warning she calls on me to translate it. I swallow hard, and try: "It's raining in my heart like it's raining in the city. What is this sadness that pierces my heart?" Saying these words out loud, right in front of the whole class, makes me feel like I'm not wearing any clothes. ~ Sonya Sones

Nothing recalls the past like music ... ~ Madame De Stael

Andrew Murray once said that what the church and individuals have to dread is the inordinate activity of the soul with its power of mind and will. F. B. Meyer declared that had he not known about the dividing of spirit and soul, he could not have imagined what his spiritual life would have been. Many others, such as Otto Stockmayer, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Evan Roberts, Madame Guyon, have given the same testimony. ~ Watchman Nee

Alas, madame!" exclaimed Athos, "to-day love is like war
the breastplate is becoming useless. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Every day, I wish to make the world more beautiful than I found it. ~ Madame De Pompadour

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all. ~ Madame De Stael

I recall having read, at the brothers' instance, Madame Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy. This book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The Comtesse's fellow prisoners in this antechamber to death were characteristic of the ill-assorted gatherings thrown together in Revolutionary prisons: duchesses and prostitutes, actresses and politicians: the Duchesse de Crequy-Montmorency and Madame Roland; Madame du Barry and Madame Brissot; the random debris of a sunken ship thrown together for a moment by the tide of fortune and a moment later violently dispersed. All of them were already ghosts, standing on the shoreline of the last limits of life, waiting their turn for Charon and his grim tumbrel to ferry them across the Styx. ~ Stanley Loomis

Welcome to your very first lesson," she was happy to announce. "Before we begin, I have one question to ask you. Can anyone tell me what the difference is between a wound and a scar? Between weakness and strength? And between hatred and love?"
Emerelda raised her hand. "Is it time?" she asked.
"Correct!" Madame Weatherberry cheered.
"How did you know that?" Tangerina asked.
"She's an hour late and she's dressed in clocks," Emerelda said. "I figured it was a safe bet."
"Time is the most complex device in the universe," Madame Weatherberry went on. "It is both the problem and the solution to most of life's dilemmas. It heals all wounds, but in the end, it takes us all. Unfortunately, time is rarely in anyone's favor. We have too little or too much but never the time we want or need. Sometimes we're born into a time that doesn't value us, and too often, we let those times determine how we value ourselves. So for your first assignment, you are going to get rid of any unfavorable opinions, insecurities, or self-hatred that the times have instilled within you. If we are going to successfully change the world's perspective of us, we must start by hanging our perspective of ourselves. ~ Chris Colfer

Not all men are the same, you know. With someone such as Gavriel, I would suggest appearing aloof, not chasing too much. He might see that as suffocating rather than charming.
Her words are sharp, but her voice is sweet, like honey on the edge of a blade, and meant to be cutting. I comfort myself with the knowledge that if Duval ever feels smothered by me, it will be because I am holding a pillow over his face and commending his soul to Mortain. ~ R.L. LaFevers

was driving up S 25th St., this afternoon, and saw this saying on a sign: "Look at life through the windshield, not the rear-view mirror."

Well, I pondered on that a bit. I sense a bit of danger with the idea of not checking out the rear view mirror on occasion. Like driving, it is important we know what has been and what could be coming from behind.

Some old cliches are around because they are true..."If you forget the past, you're bound to repeat it."...."Be prepared"... "Keep your eye on the prize."

Reflections ... Presence ... Aspirations ... ~ F. M. Proctor 'Madame Mim'

For if there are saints, Madame knows they are few, and none of them are remembered long. ~ Adam McOmber