149 quotes
I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation.
Mes Haines [My Hates (1866)
No, the only good was to be found in non-existence or, if one had to exist, in being a tree, a stone, or lower still, a grain of sand, for that cannot bleed under the heel of every passer-by.
Germinal (1885)
You know, I'm disgusted when dirty little boys run after old women.
Nana (1880)
How she had cheated herself with her integrity and nice honor, which had girt her round with the empty joys of piety! No, no; she had had enough of it; she wished to live!
Une page d'amour (1878)
A woman's opinion, however humble she may be, is always worth listening to, if she's got any sense... If you put yourself in my hands, I shall certainly make a decent man of you.
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883)
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
La Terre (1887)
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.
Germinal (1885)
Madame Jules was a woman of no age. She had the parchment skin and changeless features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew in their younger years.
Nana (1880)
He was one of the simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had remained on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers which from a distance he took for stars.
La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. But I am quite calm; I shall conquer. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. I may be condemned here. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor.
For a moment he thought he could see, in a flash, the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of wild, satiated appetites in the midst of a blaze of gold and blood.
La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
Thérèse, residing in damp obscurity, in gloomy, crushing silence, saw life expand before her in all its nakedness, each night bringing the same cold couch, and each morn the same empty day.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
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.
Germinal (1885)
Meanwhile, in Paris, truth was marching on, inevitably, and we know how the long-awaited storm broke.
J'accuse...! (1898)
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud!
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
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.
Thérèse Raquin (1867)
The ground was trembling under their feet, and they clung to the resolutions made in their calmer hours so as not to sink into the abyss.
La joie de vivre (1883)
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.
La Bête humaine (1890)
She was listening to his proposals, and continually refusing them with shakes of the head, and that temptress's laughter which is peculiar to a voluptuous blonde.
Nana (1880)