Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison. . Gustave Flaubert
About This Quote

This quote is a vivid analogy of the process of writing. Books are not born, they are made like pyramids. As the author says, there is a lot of work that goes into making a book. The long-pondered plan becomes the stone that becomes the pyramid.

That’s why it takes so long to write a book. But once done, what is written also tower over other books and can make an impact on readers.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. - David Mitchell
  2. The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  3. It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and... - Deb Caletti
  4. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."" Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes,... - Jane Austen
  5. Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you. - E. Lockhart
More Quotes By Gustave Flaubert
  1. It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
  2. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
  3. Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.
  4. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it
  5. One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Related Topics