Quotes from Madame Bovary
20 notable lines from Gustave Flaubert · 1856
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Quotations follow the Lydia Davis translation (Penguin Classics, 2010) — our recommended edition.
human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
The narrator on the inadequacy of language, Part II Ch. XII · trans. Marx-Aveling We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a “new fellow,” not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.
Opening line, Part I Ch. I · trans. Marx-Aveling He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.
Closing line, on the pharmacist Homais, Part III Ch. XI · trans. Marx-Aveling She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.
Emma, beginning her affair with Rodolphe, Part II Ch. IX · trans. Marx-Aveling She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
Narrator She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.
On Emma's restlessness, Part I Ch. IX · trans. Marx-Aveling A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered.
Emma on the constraints of women, Part II Ch. III · trans. Marx-Aveling And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.
On Emma's bookish ideals, Part I Ch. V · trans. Marx-Aveling He had laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language.
On Rodolphe's seduction, Part II Ch. XII · trans. Marx-Aveling Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken.
On Emma's marriage to Charles, Part I Ch. V · trans. Marx-Aveling Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
Emma's disenchantment, Part I Ch. VII · trans. Marx-Aveling It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere.
On Emma's longing for elsewhere, Part I Ch. VII · trans. Marx-Aveling The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.
On Emma's hopelessness, Part I Ch. VII · trans. Marx-Aveling Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.
On the woman's lot, Part II Ch. III · trans. Marx-Aveling She was not happy—she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?
On Emma's despair, Part III Ch. VI · trans. Marx-Aveling One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it forces upon us.
Emma Bovary Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love always
The blind beggar's song, heard as Emma dies, Part III Ch. VIII · trans. Marx-Aveling There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.
The narrator after Emma's death, Part III Ch. IX · trans. Marx-Aveling He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression.
On Rodolphe's cynicism, Part II Ch. XII · trans. Marx-Aveling