Where Books and Readers Come Together
“I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.”
“A common oblivion obliterates everything… The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.”
“And my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck… I cried out with myself as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: ‘How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes.’”
“The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him.”
“They seemed to me now no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament.”
“Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society” (p 12).
Gustave Flaubert, much to his dismay, is often remembered for his famed novel Madame Bovary and as the father of realism.
