149 quotes
If the world is to die of misery, at any rate let it die cheerfully, and in sympathy with itself!
La joie de vivre (1883)
When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.
La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
The courtesans, as Vandeuvres used to say, avenged public morality by emptying his money bags.
Nana (1880)
The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow.
La Curée (1872)
Nothing could be more heartrending than this mute and motionless despair.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
Both women, looking different ways, kept shrugging their shoulders, and asking themselves how the deuce the other could tell such woppers!
Nana (1880)
After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
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.
Nana (1880)
The nature of the circumstances seemed to have made this woman for this man, and to have thrust one towards the other.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
When they seated themselves in their carriage, they seemed to be greater strangers than before.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.
Germinal (1885)
The pride of abnegation had vanished, and she was willing that those she loved should be happy through other instrumentality than her own.
La joie de vivre (1883)
The first court martial was perhaps unintelligent; the second one is inescapably criminal.
J'accuse...! (1898)
There were men so ambitious that they would wipe the masters' behinds to hear them say thank you.
Germinal (1885)
Paris, like a patch of starlit sky that had fallen upon the black earth, seemed to him quite forbidding, as though angered by his return.
Le Ventre de Paris (1873)
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.
La Bête humaine (1890)
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.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
She never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, or her personal concerns. There was only one thing she never sold, and that was herself.
La Curée (1872)
Wasn't it true that the moment two women were together in the presence of their lovers their first idea was to do one another out of them? It was a law of nature!
Nana (1880)