Émile Zola Quotes

Ne me regardez plus comme ça, parce que vous allez vous user les yeux.

She was a combative virgin, was Flora, scornful of the male sex, all of which in the end had led folk to conclude that she could not be quite all there.

Death and the sowing of seeds: and the life of bread growing up out of the earth.

Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la terre.

Only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play.

Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going.

If the earth was restful and good to those who loved it, the villagers contaminating it like vermin, those human insects battening on it's flesh, were enough to disgrace it and blight any approach to it.

They all listened to him, with curiosity but with the blank indifference of practical people who in their hearts no longer feared his God of wrath and chastisement. ... The whole thing was a complete waste of time; there was much more point in keeping on the right side of the Government police, who were the people with the power.

It was the noisome fruit of ignorance and filth, ever recurring, the Black Death, the Great Plague, which stride like giant skeletons through past centuries, scything down the pale, sad people of the countryside.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones.

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. ... It’s like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time.

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

Haven’t I told you scores of times that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!

Oh, beneficent earth, take me unto thee, thou who art our common mother, our only source of life! thou the eternal, the immortal one, in whom circulates the soul of the world, the sap that spreads even into the stones, and makes the trees themselves our big, motionless brothers! Yes, I wish to lose myself in thee; it is thou that I feel beneath my limbs, clasping and inflaming me; thou alone shalt appear in my work as the primary force, the means and the end, the immense ark in which everything becomes animated with the breath of every being!