Émile Zola Quotes

Ne dis pas ces choses, répétait-elle, car je n'aurais plus la force de te quitter, je resterais là... Donne moi du courage plutôt; dis-moi que nous nous verrons encore...

Does anyone kill as the result of reasoning? People only kill by an impulse of blood and nerves—the necessity to live, the joy of being strong.

Alors, Nana, tout de suite, entama La Faloise. Il postulait depuis longtemps l'honneur d'être ruiné par elle, afin d'être parfaitement chic.

Why had he found her unattractive? Now that she was all black and her face covered in a thin layer of coal-dust, she had a strange charm.

إن أخرست الحقيقة ودفنتها تحت الأرض فسوف تَنْمو وتُنبِت

They spoke one after the other in a despairing voice, giving expression to their complaints. The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since '89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one way or another it would have to come to an end, either quietly by laws, by an understanding in good fellowship, or like savages by burning everything and devouring one another. Even if they never saw it, their children would certainly see it, for the century could not come to an end without another revolution, that of the workers this time, a general hustling which would cleanse society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with more cleanliness and justice.

The shelves had the melancholy emptiness and the false luxury of families where inferior meat is purchased so as to be able to put flowers on the table.

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.

She made a savage, angry effort at revolt, and, then all at once gave in. They exchanged not a word. The act was silent and brutal.

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

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

Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassans sleeps while Paris fights.

His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by a wavering faith, were replaced by this bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Women now came and spent their leisure time in his establishment, the shivering and anxious hours they formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, a growing struggle of the god of dress against the husband, the incessantly renewed religion of the body with the divine future of beauty.

The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.

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