"A clear days warmth will often move A lass to stray in dreams of love..."
Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, commonly known as simply Madame Bovary, is the début novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, originally published in 1856 and 1857. The eponymous character, Emma Bovary, lives beyond her means in order to escape the ennui of provincial life.
"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."
"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."