A Quote by Kathryn Harrison

The power of 'Madame Bovary' stems from Flaubert's determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes.

Kathryn Harrison

Quote Topics

Determination Each Exactly Feels His Looks Madame Object Power Render Scrutiny Smells Sounds Stems Tastes

Quote Author

Kathryn Harrison
American - Author
Born: March 20, 1961

Flaubert's famous sentence, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary, she is me"), in reality means, " Madame Bovary, c'est nous" ("Madame Bovary, she is us"), in our modern incapacity to live a "good-enough" life.

Sophie Barthes

I have a boundless passion for Flaubert. It's unthinkable to me that someone might not have read 'Madame Bovary.' He writes with a scalpel. Everything has meaning. My students were not allowed not to like him!

Brigitte Macron

Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information ... explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.

Jill Bolte Taylor

Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche.

Sophie Barthes

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). (...) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life.

Michael Dirda

Madame Bovary is one my favorite novels. Emma Bovary will always be an enigma, but as the years pass, I feel that I understand her better. She has a violent nostalgia, almost an infantile nostalgia, to be understood by the men surrounding her. I like her relentless fight for independence, her rebellion against the mediocre, and her quest for the sublime, even if she burns her wigs in the process. I like that Flaubert never judges her morally for her self-destructiveness, for her desperate attempt to satisfy her wildest desires and appetites.

Sophie Barthes

Madame Bovary is myself.

Gustave Flaubert

It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita

Laura Esquivel

I try to convey what it feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like inside of my particular skin, to move through the world as a black American woman in her mid-twenties.

Morgan Parker

'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one.

Kathryn Harrison

I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties.

Lydia Davis

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

David Mitchell

Despair kinda smells like burnt hair. Sounds great, but smells lousy. Now fear... fear you can taste! Let's see, fear kinda tastes like... like peaches, peaches covered with fresh bone marrow

Matt Wagner

Whether you are cooking, cleaning house, or planting flowers, try to concentrate on the textures, the smells, colors, tastes, sounds, all Zen moments of focused joy.

Jerry Lynch

When a child’s life is full of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, people and places, he will learn. When he feels safe and loved, he will learn. When parents begin to recover from their own ideas of what learning should look like (what they remember from school), then they begin a new life of natural learning, too.