20 quotes
If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.
Germinal (1885)
"Bread! is that enough, idiots!"
Germinal (1885)
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)
There were men so ambitious that they would wipe the masters' behinds to hear them say thank you.
Germinal (1885)
When a man was honest in his dealings, you could forgive him the rest.
Germinal (1885)
Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.
Germinal (1885)
Oh, those bourgeois scum! One day they’d stuff 'em with champagne and truffles till their guts burst!
Germinal (1885)
They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.
Germinal (1885)
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.
Germinal (1885)
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)
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)
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)
This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies.
Germinal (1885)
On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet.
Germinal (1885)
The fire from heaven had fallen on this Sodom in the bowels of the earth where long ago pit girls committed untold abominations, and it had fallen so swiftly that they had not had time to come up, so that to this very day they were still burning down in this hell.
Germinal (1885)
But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored.
Germinal (1885)
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.
Germinal (1885)
It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks bursting out of her breeches.
Germinal (1885)
She was haunted by the vision of Chaval, and rambled on about him, about their cat and dog life together, the one day when he had been nice to her, in Jean-Bart, and the other days or alternate caresses and blows, when he half killed her with his embraces after nearly beating her to death.
Germinal (1885)
"And, then, if only there were some truth in what the priests say, if only the poor of this world were rich in the next!"
These words were greeted with a burst of laughter, and even the children shrugged their shoulders, for the hard wind blowing from the outer world had taken away all their belief. They harbored a secret fear of ghosts down in the mine, but scoffed at the empty heavens.
Germinal (1885)