Émile Zola Quotes

Sometimes she was seized with hallucinations and thought she was buried in some vault together with a lot of puppet-like corpses which nodded their heads and moved their legs and arms when you pulled the strings.

From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture.

It was like a lightning flash of passion, swift and blinding in a leaden sky.

Desprezava os discursadores, os astutos que entram na política como quem entra na advocacia, para ganhar dinheiro com a retórica.

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

But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored.

There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead.

Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

"Cependant Quenu se rappelait une phrase de Charvet, cette fois, qui déclarait que "ces bourgeois empâtés, ces boutiquiers engraissés, prêtant leur soutien à un gouvernement d' indigestion générale, devaient êtres jetés les premiers au cloaque." C' était grâce à eux, grâce à leur égoïsme du ventre, que le despotisme s' imposait et rongeait une nation."

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.

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

As if one killed by calculation! A person kills only from an impulse that springs from his blood and sinews, from the vestiges of ancient struggles, from the need to live and the joy of being strong.

Like certain devotees, who think they can fool God and wrest a pardon by paying lip-service to prayer and adopting the humble attitude of the penitent, Therese humiliated herself, beat her chest, found words of repentance, without having anything in the bottom of her heart except fear and cowardice.