Madame Bovary

"She had confused novels with life and paid the price"

"Her debts were the visible manifestation of her invisible despair"

"She sought in passion what she could not find in marriage"

"Love for her was a theater in which she played the tragic heroine"

"She had wanted to be extraordinary but was condemned to be ordinary"

"Her defeats were her own, yet she never felt responsible for them"

"She believed that somewhere existence held perfect happiness"

"Constancy was a virtue unknown to her nature"

"She could not live in the world as it was, only as she dreamed it"

"Her imagination had always been her truest lover"

"She had wanted to transcend her circumstances but lacked the strength to do so"

"The world outside her desires seemed small and contemptible"

"She mistook the excitement of deception for the reality of love"

"Her beauty had promised her more than life could deliver"

"She had read too many novels to be content with her own life"

"Routine was her slow poison"

"She believed in grand passions and impossible dreams"

"Her restlessness was the price of her sensitivity"

"She had sought infinity in the finite world"

"Reality had disappointed her so thoroughly that fantasy became her only refuge"

"Her disasters were of her own making, yet she felt victimized by them"

"She had confused the flattery of lovers with the love of a husband"

"Her infidelity was less about passion than about escape"

"The provincial life crushed everything beautiful in her"

"She spent money as if it were a form of feeling"

"Despair has its own eloquence"

"She had wanted to die, and now she wanted to live recklessly"

"Boredom was her deepest wound"

"She could not reconcile the man she wanted with the one before her"

"Her dreams were more real to her than the world around her"