Madame Bovary

"Every surface of her world seemed to mock her secret longings"

"She mistook agitation for passion"

"Her heart was vast and changeable as the sea"

"Reality was far more tedious than the novels she read"

"She had learned to dissemble as naturally as she breathed"

"Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great thunder and lightning"

"She invented pleasures for herself in her imagination"

"The monotony of her life was breaking her spirit"

"Desire had made her eloquent"

"She was as much a product of her reading as of her circumstances"

"In the end, we are all betrayed by our own desires"

"Love is the name we give to our desperation for meaning"

"She had read novels about heroines but became a cautionary tale"

"The body betrays the spirit long before the spirit knows it"

"Happiness is always someone else's invention"

"She was a story that no author could finish satisfactorily"

"The mind creates prisons more terrible than any real cell"

"Art imitates life, but life imitates nothing but itself"

"She had loved too many men and none of them well"

"The town itself seemed a conspiracy against her happiness"

"Regret is the only teacher that arrives too late"

"She mistook novelty for meaning"

"We are all complicit in our own unhappiness"

"The heart is a fickle instrument, poorly tuned from the start"

"Desire is the only immortality we are granted"

"She had spent her life running from herself"

"Patience is the virtue only of those with no other choice"

"The pen and the heart are poor guides to living"

"She learned too late that passion and dignity cannot coexist"

"What we imagine is always more beautiful than what we possess"