94 Flaubert's Parrot Quotes & Sayings with Wallpapers & Posters - Quotes.Pub

Here you will find all the famous Flaubert's Parrot quotes. There are more than 94 quotes in our Flaubert's Parrot quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Flaubert's Parrot wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes by some of the famous authors like Julian Barnes

The one thing that is very good in life today is death.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

both her secret life and her despair lay in the same inner chamber of her heart, inaccessible to me.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

the liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

You got your cheese, I hope? You won't mind a word of advice? Eat it. Don't put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know where you are it'll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical factory. You'll open the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

1846Сред мореплавателите има такива, които откриват нови светове, прибавят земи към земята и звезди към звездите: те са властелините, великите мъже, нетленно прекрасните. Други бълват ужас от корабните оръдия, грабят, забогатяват и затлъстяват. Други пък поемат да търсят злато и коприна под чуждо небе. Има и такива, дето ловят сьомга за чревоугодниците и треска за бедняците. Аз съм невзрачният търпелив ловец на бисери, който се гмурка в дълбочините и излиза с празни ръце и посиняло лице. Някаква гибелна съблазън ме тегли надолу към бездните на мисълта, към онази съкровена глъб, която вечно изкушава силните. Цял живот ще съзерцавам океана на изкуството, в който други плават и се сражават, и навремени за разтуха ще се гмуркам за ония никому ненужни зелени и жълти мидички. Ще си ги събирам и ще облепя с тях стените на моята колиба.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it;

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

lethargic meliorist;

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

Humanity Quotes / Flaubert's Parrot Quotes Cynicism Quotes Letters of Sigmund Freud Quotes 1873-1939 Quotes Mankind Quotes

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love’s favourite perversion?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all. You trustthe mystifier more if you know his deliberately choosing not to be lucid.You would trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... "Mad" has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

...perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes Writing Quotes

If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Old love is a row of beach huts in November.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents, and leading to a painfully predictable dénouement. Adherents of the latter view tend to cite Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘People say that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ Candidates are advised not to use this quotation in their answers.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe the Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills -- literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Truths about writing can be framed before you’ve published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it’s too late to make any difference.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes Past Quotes

He loved his mother: doesn't that warm your silly, sentimental, twentieth-century heart? He loved his father. He loved his sister. He loved his niece. He loved his friends. He admired certain individuals. But his affections were always specific; they were not given away to all comers. This seems enough to me.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Защо творбите ни подтикват да преследваме писателите? Защо не оставим хората на мира? Не можем ли да се задоволим само с книгите им?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin.

Autobiography Quotes Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn't select.

Endings Quotes Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

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 need never intrude on the relationship; it may be sporadic, but when there it is always intense.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

[Louise Colet was a p]roto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

He loved his mother: doesn't that warm your silly, sentimental, twentieth-century heart? He loved his father. He loved his sister. He loved his niece. He loved his friends. He admired certain individuals. But his affections were always specific; they were not given away to all comers. This seems enough to me. You want him to do more? You want him to 'love humanity', to goose the human race? But that means nothing. Loving humanity means as much and as little as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes Morality Quotes Progress Quotes Stupidity Quotes

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.

Anger Quotes Condition Quotes Existence Quotes Flaubert's Parrot Quotes Life Quotes Misleading Quotes

When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.Afterward comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological-- vertigo in a shelving canyon -- but it's not like that; it's just misery as regular as a job. What do we doctors say? I'm deeply sorry, Mrs Blank; there will of course be a period of mourning but rest assured you will come out of it; two of these each evening, I would suggest; perhaps a new interst, Mrs Blank; can maintenance, formation dancing?; don't worry, six months will see you back on the roundabout; come and see me again any time; oh nurse, when she calls, just give her this repeat will you, no I don't need to see her, well it's not her that's dead is it, look on the bright side. What did she say her name was?And then it happens to you. There's no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time.... you should eat stuffed sow's heart. I might yet have to fall back on this remedy. I've tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that's all it's ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn't; often, it doesn't even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands.Other people think you want to talk. 'Do you want to talk about Ellen?' they ask, hinting that they won't be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don't; it makes little difference. The word aren't the right ones; or rather, the right words don't exist. 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people's griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables.And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But your don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Look, writers aren't perfect, I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes References Quotes

Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst - be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark - you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

Books are not life, however much we may wish they were

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?

Flaubert's Parrot Quotes

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

Eyes Quotes Flaubert's Parrot Quotes Writing Quotes

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