Emile Zola

Quotes

1. The idea of death, blurted out in despair between a couple of kisses, returned implacable and keen.

2. 

   All of a sudden, in the good-natured child the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater.

3. 

   This woman was as necessary to his life as eating and drinking.

4. 

   The nature of the circumstances seemed to have made this woman for this man, and to have thrust one towards the other.

5. 

   She liked this young fellow with that expansive feeling that old women display for people who come from their own part of the country, bringing with them memories of the past.

6. 

   They, poor devils, were just machine-fodder, they were penned like cattle in housing-estates, the big Companies were gradually dominating their whole lives, regulating slavery, threatening to enlist all the nation’s workers, millions of hands to increase the wealth of a thousand idlers.

   • Society
   • Work

7. 

   If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

   • Love
   • Happiness

8. 

   What idiot imagined that happiness in this world depended on a share-out of wealth? These starry-eyed revolutionaries could demolish society and build a brave new world if they liked, but they would not by so doing add one single joy to man’s lot, nor relieve him of a single pain merely by sharing out the cake. In fact they would only spread out the unhappiness of the world, and some day they would make the very dogs howl with despair by removing them from the simple satisfaction of their instincts and raising them to the unsatisfied yearnings of passion.

   • Happiness

9. 

   Like those antique monsters whose redoubtable domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls. She was ringed round with catastrophes.

   • Evil

10. 

    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.

    • Beauty

11. 

    There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.

    • Politics
    • Society

12. 

    Antagonism breeds extremism, and it was turning one into the zealous revolutionary and the other into an excessive advocate of caution, taking them beyond what they really thought and forcing them to adopt positions of which they then became prisoners.

    • Politics