"Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough"
About this Quote
Boredom, for Flaubert, is less a condition of the world than a failure of attention. "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough" sounds democratic, even comforting, but it’s also a writer’s threat: the gaze can make meaning whether life volunteers it or not. Coming from the patron saint of painstaking prose, the line doubles as a manifesto for craft. Interest isn’t discovered; it’s manufactured by patience, selection, and the ruthless discipline of noticing.
The subtext is a rebuke to the Romantic habit of waiting for inspiration. Flaubert spent years chiseling sentences toward le mot juste, convinced that style could redeem the ordinary. His novels are crowded with objects, gestures, petty vanities - the exact stuff that supposedly isn’t "worth writing about" - then rendered with such fixated precision that it starts to glow. The quote flatters the reader’s curiosity, but it also exposes curiosity as labor: keep looking past the first, lazy label and the surface gives way to systems - class, desire, self-deception.
Context matters. Mid-19th-century France is modernizing; the bourgeois worldview is consolidating; spectacle and consumer novelty are rising. Against that churn, Flaubert’s prolonged stare is almost countercultural. It refuses the market’s demand for constant stimulation and suggests a different economy: depth over speed. The irony is that "anything" includes the banal lives his characters inhabit - and by staring long enough, Flaubert shows how banality isn’t empty at all, just densely packed with illusions.
The subtext is a rebuke to the Romantic habit of waiting for inspiration. Flaubert spent years chiseling sentences toward le mot juste, convinced that style could redeem the ordinary. His novels are crowded with objects, gestures, petty vanities - the exact stuff that supposedly isn’t "worth writing about" - then rendered with such fixated precision that it starts to glow. The quote flatters the reader’s curiosity, but it also exposes curiosity as labor: keep looking past the first, lazy label and the surface gives way to systems - class, desire, self-deception.
Context matters. Mid-19th-century France is modernizing; the bourgeois worldview is consolidating; spectacle and consumer novelty are rising. Against that churn, Flaubert’s prolonged stare is almost countercultural. It refuses the market’s demand for constant stimulation and suggests a different economy: depth over speed. The irony is that "anything" includes the banal lives his characters inhabit - and by staring long enough, Flaubert shows how banality isn’t empty at all, just densely packed with illusions.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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