Émile Zola Quotes

She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?

Paris, pareil à un pan de ciel étoilé tombé sur un coin de la terre noire, lui apparut sévère et comme fâché de son retour.

Puis le moment de la séparation sonnait, Miette remontait sur son mur. Elle lui envoyait des baisers. Et il ne la voyait plus. Une émotion terrible le prit à la gorge: il ne la verrait plus jamais, jamais.

Si vous me demandez ce que je viens faire en ce monde, moi artiste, je vous répondrai: je viens vivre tout haut.

Must a woman know how to act and sing? Oh, my chicken, you're too stoopid: Nana has other good points, by Heaven!—something which is as good as all the other things put together.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

Things were definitely going badly. The night looked like ending in disaster. In one corner of the room Maria Blond had started squabbling with Léa de Horn, whom she accused of sleeping with men who weren't really rich.

The young woman seemed to take pleasure in being bold and shameless. She had no hesitation, no fear whatsoever. She threw herself into adultery with a sort of vigorous sincerity, defying danger and doing so with a sort of vanity in her defiance.

She was haunted by the vision of Chaval, and rambled on about him, about their cat and dog life together, the one day when he had been nice to her, in Jean-Bart, and the other days or alternate caresses and blows, when he half killed her with his embraces after nearly beating her to death.

It was a house of shadows, where the sunshine was filtered down to a guttering night-light strength between the laths of the window-shutters. (89)

"... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!...

"Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.

Gerçeği gömmeniz boşuna, toprağın altında yol alıyor; bir gün, her yandan fışkıracak, öç bitkileri olarak açılacaktır.

Could he love this one, without killing her?

On May 5, 1896, he wrote in his diary; “I have no longer anything to say; everything is alike in its horrible cruelty.

The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.