Flaubert's Parrot Quotes
"Nothing much else to do with Flaubert has ever lasted."
"Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation?"
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so?"
"The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
"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."
"I am a bear and I want to stay a bear in my den."
"The day I stop being indignant I shall fall flat on my face, like a doll when you take away its prop."
"Never have things of the spirit counted for so little."
"But there I go, complaining again, and I don’t want to distress you."
"A book of poetry is preferable to a railway."
"I once heard Dr Starkie lecture, and I’m glad to report that she had an atrocious French accent."
"The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed."
"I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy."
"A modernist moment, too: this is the sort of exchange, in which the everyday tampers with the sublime."
"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes."
"Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description."
"No book can be dangerous if it is well written."
"No, the reason I hate critics – well, some of the time – is that they write sentences like this."
"English, I noticed, requires more words than French, German or Italian to convey this advice."
"We are too impertinent with the past, counting on it in this way for a reliable frisson."
"Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot."
"Do the books that writers don’t write matter?"
"The sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written."
"An idea isn’t always abandoned because it fails some quality-control test."
"The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all."
"The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree."
"Life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty."
"The possibilities of the not-life will always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life."
"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."
"The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly, viciously."
"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."
"The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can."
"The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along."
"Old love is a row of beach huts in November."
"Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?" (1855)
"Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't."
"Maxims for life: You cannot change humanity, you can only know it."
"Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own."
"Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
"Why load [the despairing] with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?"
"The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be."
"The one thing that is very good in life today is death."
"The patient. Ellen. So you could say, in answer to that earlier question, that I killed her."
"It’s just a question of temperament. Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act."
"Happiness is a scarlet cloak whose lining is in tatters."