Madame Bovary

"Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadnt come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "rapture" — words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

"She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery."

"The sentimental songs she sang in music class were all about little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers — mawkish compositions that allowed her to glimpse, through the silliness of the words and the indiscretions of the music, the alluring, phantasmagoric realm of genuine feeling."

"And now she could not bring herself to believe that the uneventful life she was leading was the happiness of which she had dreamed."

"But even as they were brought closer together by the details of daily life, she was separated from him by a growing sense of inward detachment. Charles conversation was flat as a sidewalk, a place of passage for the ideas of everyman; they wore drab everyday clothes, and they inspired neither laughter nor dreams."

"It seemed to her that certain portions of the earth must produce happiness — as thought it were a plant native only to those soils and doomed to languish elsewhere. Why couldnt she be leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet? Or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband clad in a long black velvet coat and wearing soft leather shoes, a high-crowned hat and fancy cuffs?"

"She might have been glad to confide all these things to someone. But how to speak about so elusive a malaise, one that keeps changing its shape like the clouds and its direction like the wind? She could find no words; and hence neither occasion nor courage came to hand."

"Everything immediately surrounding her — boring countryside, inane petty bourgeois, the mediocrity of daily life — seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She had been caught in it all by some accident: out beyond, there stretched as far as the eye could see the immense territory of rapture and passions. In her longing she made no difference between the pleasures of luxury and the joys of the heart, between elegant living and sensitive feeling. Didnt love, like Indian plants, require rich soils, special temperatures?"

"Though she had no one to write to, she had bought herself a blotter, a writing case, a pen and envelopes; she would dust off her whatnot, look at herself in the mirror, take up a book, and then begin to daydream and let it fall to her lap. ... She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris."

"So from now on they [the days] were going to continue one after the other like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! ... It was Gods will. The future was a pitch-black tunnel, ending in a locked door. She gave up her music: why should she play? Who was there to listen? ... She left her drawing books and her embroidery in a closet What was the use of anything? What was the use?"

"Whats more delightful than an evening beside the fire with a nice bright lamp and a book, listening to the wind beating against the windows?" "How true!" she said, her great dark eyes fixed widely on him. "Im absolutely removed from the world at such times," he said. "The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there Im wandering in countries I can see every detail of — Im playing a role in the story Im reading. I actually feel Im the characters — I live and breathe with them."

"Seen from so close, her eyes appeared larger than life, especially when she opened and shut her eyelids several times on awakening: black when looked at in the shadow, dark blue in bright light, they seemed to contain layer upon layer of color, thicker and cloudier beneath, lighter and more transparent toward the lustrous surface."