The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.

The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.

Bouvard and Pécuchet put forward their abominable paradoxes on other occasions. They cast doubt on the honesty of men, the chastity of women, the intelligence of the government, the good sense of the people, in a word undermined the basic principles.

She no longer existed.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.