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Memoirs of a Madman and November
Gustave Flaubert
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I love the autumn—that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.”
“I touched her comb and took it out; her hair came flooding down like a wave, and her long black tresses quivered as they fell to her hips. I immediately ran my hand over it, and in it, and beneath it; I plunged my arm into it, and bathed my face in it, filled with sadness. Sometimes I would enjoy separating it into two, from behind, and then bringing it over her shoulder so as to hide her breasts; then I would bring all her hair together in a mesh, and pull it so that her head came back and her neck was thrown forward; she let me do what I wanted, like a dead woman.”
“Are you not tired as I am of waking up every morning and seeing the sun all over again? Tired of living the same life, suffering the same sorrow? Tired of desiring, and tired of being sated? Tired of waiting, and tired of possessing?”
“Poor human weakness! With your words, your languages, your sounds, you speak and stammer—you define God, the heaven and the earth, chemistry and philosophy, and you cannot express, with your language, all the joy that you derive from a naked woman—or a plum pudding.”
“So that was all love was! That was all a woman was! Good Lord, why do we still hunger even when we are sated? Why so many aspirations and so many disappointments? Why is man's heart so big and life so small? There are days when even the love of the angels would not suffice it, and in a single hour it grows weary of all the caresses of earth.”
“I was born longing to die.”
“For you have doubtless done as I did at the age of fifteen, you have once thought you were in love with that burning and frenzied love of the kind you've seen in books, whereas all you were suffering from was just a slight scratch on the epidermis of your heart left by that iron claw called passion, and you were blowing with all the strength of your imagination on that modest fire that was barely even alight.”
“But life is not a series of deeds. My life is my thoughts.”
“As a child I loved what can be seen, as a teenager what can be felt, as a man I no longer love anything.”
“As a child I dreamt of love—as a young man of fame—as a man, of the tomb, that last love of those who have no love left.”
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Book Keywords:
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