Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

"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."

"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."

"The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love."

"But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted."