Emile Zola

Quotes

1. 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.

2. 

   Then Nana started on la Faloise at once. He had for some time been longing for the honour of being ruined by her in order to put the finishing stroke on his smartness.

3. 

   In reality, one single thought tormented them: they were irritated at their crime, and in despair at having for ever troubled their lives.

4. 

   Sometimes, forcing themselves to hope, they sought to resume the burning dreams of other days, and were quite astonished to find they had no imagination.

5. 

   Yes, that is your idea, all of you French workmen; you want to unearth a treasure in order to devour it alone afterwards in some lazy, selfish corner. You may cry out as much as you like against the rich, you haven't got courage enough to give back to the poor the money that luck brings you. You will never be worthy of happiness as long as you own anything, and your hatred of the bourgeois proceeds solely from an angry desire to be bourgeois yourselves in their place.

6. 

   There were men so ambitious that they would wipe the masters' behinds to hear them say thank you.

7. 

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

8. 

   When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter.

9. 

   "Bread! is that enough, idiots!"

10. 

    For half an hour the shaft went on devouring in this fashion, with more or less greedy gulps, according to the depth of the level to which the men went down, but without stopping, always hungry, with its giant intestines capable of digesting a nation.

11. 

    He experienced keen pleasure mingled with remorse, the kind of pleasure known only to Catholics who, in the midst of sin, are goaded by the fear of hell.

12. 

    Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upward for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.