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?”
― Émile Zola, The Joy of Life

“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.”
― Émile Zola, The Joy of Life

“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?”
― Émile Zola, The Joy of Life

“The sea with its perpetual oscillation, that obstinate swell sweeping up to the cliffs twice a day, exasperated him: it was senseless force, indifferent to his grief, wearing down the same rocks for centuries while never mourning the death of a single human being. it was too vast, too cold; and he would hurry home and shut himself indoors, to feel less insignificant, less crushed between the dual infinities of sea and sky.”
― Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life

“What scum respectable people are!”
― Émile Zola

“The ground was shaking beneath their feet and they clung to the resolutions they had made in calmer moments, to avoid plunging into the abyss.”
― Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life

“Her pride in self-abnegation had left her, and she accepted that her loved ones could find happiness without her help.”
― Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life

“His was the sceptical boredom of a whole generation, no longer the romantic ennui of a Werther or a Rene lamenting the passing of old beliefs, but the boredom of the new doubting heroes, the young chemists who angrily proclaim the world intolerable because they have not immediately found life at the bottom of their test tubes.”
― Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life

“If the world is to die in misery, let it at least go out with a song on its lips, and pity for itself.”
― Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life

“Well, my friends, don’t let my ways surprise you. I have read Malatesta, Tolstoy and Zola, so I have understood many things that I couldn’t before”
― Luisa Capetillo

“Per un istante, temendo di svenire a quell'odore di donna che ritrovava più caldo, moltiplicato, sotto il soffitto basso, si sedette sul bordo del divano imbottito, tra le due finestre. Ma si rialzò immediatamente, tornò accanto alla toeletta, senza guardare più niente, gli occhi vacui, ripensando a un mazzo di tuberose che una volta era appassito nella sua stanza e l'aveva fatto quasi morire. Le tuberose, quando si decompongono, hanno un odore umano.”
― Émile Zola, Nana

“«Come vedi», continuò «tutti i mezzi conosciuti sono malvagi».”
― Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin

“I've done a Russian movie," Claire said. "Thank God they're still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child's picture book.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Thus, Symbolism and Decadence are not a separate new school which arose in France and spread throughout all of Europe: they represent the end and culmination of a certain other school whose links were very extensive and whose roots go back to the beginning of the modern age. Symbolism, easily deduced from Maupassant, can also be deduced from Zola, Flaubert, and Balzac, from Ultra-realism as the antithesis of the previous Ultra-idealism Romanticism and "renascent" Classicism. It is precisely this element of ultra - the result of ultra manifested in life itself, in its mores, ideas, proclivities, and aspirations - that has wormed into literature and remained there ever since, expressing itself, finally, in such a hideous phenomenon as Decadence and Symbolism. The ultra without its referent, exaggeration without the exaggerated object, preciosity of form conjoined with total disappearance of content, and "poetry" devoid of rhyme, meter, and sense - that is what constitutes Decadence.”
― Vasily Rozanov

“It is not the experience which leads him to the problem, but the problem which leads him to the experience. That is also Zola’s method and procedure. He begins a new novel as the German professor of the anecdote begins a new course of lectures, in order to obtain more exact information about a subject with which he is unfamiliar.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“I spite of his scientific attitude he is a romantic, and indeed much more whole-heartedly so than the other less radical naturalists of his day. His one-sided, undialectical rationalization and schematization of reality is already boldly and ruthlesslyromantic. And the symbols to which he reduces motley, many-sided, contradictory life— the city, the machine, alcohol, prostitution, the department store, the markethall, the stock exchange, the theatre, etc.—are all the more the visions of a romantic systematizer, who sees allegories instead of concrete individual phenomena everywhere.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“Pour moi, la rue de Bruxelles est demeurée tout entière dans le petit hôtel de Zola, où il recevait gentiment ses amis. Il était gourmand, il zézayait et, d'un air futé, disait de la bécasse flambée : «La fair (la chair) est quelconque, mais la faufe (la sauce) est bonne. » Sa maison était décorée de blocs de pierre sans intérêt, rapportés d'Italie, et qui excitaient l'hilarité de Goncourt, de quleques belles toiles de Manet, Cézanne et autres, et de meubles riches, qu'il croyait anciens, mais que le même Goncourt affirmait rafistolés. Son goût, sauf en peinture, était moyenâgeux et incompétent. Mon père disait : «Il aime les stalles et les cathèdres. »”
― Léon Daudet, Paris Vécu - 1ère série: Rive Droite

“Elle aimait ce garçon de cette tendresse bavarde que les vieilles femmes ont pour les gens qui viennent de leur pays, apportant avec eux des souvenirs du passé.”
― Zola, Thérèse Raquin

“Parfois, ils se forçaient à l’espérance, ils cherchaient à reprendre les rêves brûlants d’autrefois, et ils demeuraient tout étonnés, en voyant que leur imagination était vide.”
― Zola, Thérèse Raquin

“Au fond une pensée unique les rongeait : ils s’irritaient contre leur crime, ils se désespéraient d’avoir a jamais troublé leur vie.”
― Zola, Thérèse Raquin