Gustave Flaubert Quotes

If a building has been condemned or it's left to ruin, I get so upset. I feel something really deeply about it. I don't like to see anything neglected.

And blind oblivion swallowed cities up.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.

Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy.

The path of increase is slow, but the road to ruin is rapid.

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.

O thou that dost inhabit in my breast, leave not the mansion so long tenantless; lest, growing ruinous, the building fall and leave no memory of what it was!

The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

Night falls fast. Today is the past.

The night ... it is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.

The vine that has grown old on an old tree falls with the ruin of that tree, and through that bad companionship must perish with it.

Over my pile of ashes

For some reason focusing on destruction and mortality is more poetically exciting to me than hope and love.

I'm falling into disrepair

That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.

In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest, there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools

To cast in it with Hyde was to die a thousand interests and aspirations.

For in the night, unseen, a single warrior, In sombre harness mailed, Dreaded of man, and surnamed the Destroyer, The rampart wall has scaled. He passed into the chamber of the sleeper, The dark and silent room, And as he entered, darker grew, and deeper, The silence and the gloom.

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.

Silence is like nightfall. Objects are lost in it insensibly.

That the reason why they are not fallen already and do not fall now is only that God's appointed time is not come. For it is said, that when that due time, or appointed time comes, their foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight. God will not hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall into destruction; as he that stands on such slippery declining ground, on the edge of a pit, he cannot stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.