Émile Zola Quotes

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, had little by little melted her heart.

In Paris, everything's for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.

He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes.

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.

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it.

She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?