#madame

I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137) ↗

— Stephen Clarke

#bed #cannonball #cartoon #cartwheel #ceiling

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#madame-bovary #love

She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it was scattered among ruins. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#love

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#conventions #duty #gustave-flaubert #life #madame-bovary

That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it? ↗

— Peter Washington

#belief-system #madame-blavatsky-s-baboon #mystic #mysticism #religion

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#death #end #enough #far #keep

Public service used to be the highest of callings, until people like Madame Voldemort vilified it. ↗

— Jennifer M. Granholm

#like #madame #people #public #public service

If you could sit down with Jesus, you wouldn't need anybody else. He could answer all of your questions. Instead of Einstein and Louis Pasteur and Madame Curry, you could just have Jesus and he could answer for all of them. ↗

— Carol Alt

#anybody #could #curry #down #einstein

Madame Bovary is myself. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#myself

I started going to Madame Louise's, the lesbian club where all the punk bands used to go - the Sex Pistols, the Clash. I remember seeing Billy Idol walk in there; he was gorgeous. ↗

— Boy George

#billy #clash #club #go #going