Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

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 hadn’t 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.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

Everything is there: the love of Art.

Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.