Bokelskere.no

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention.

All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in his list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand." The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it.