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Germinal

Book by Émile Zola · 15 quotes · Bourgeois, Antinatalism, Beginning

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Germinal Quotes

“At the coal-face the men had returned to work. They often cut their break-time short like this, so as not to get cold; but their meal, devoured with mute voracity far from the sunlight, sat like lead on their stomachs. Stretched out on their sides, they were now tapping away harder than ever in their single-minded determination to fill a decent number of tubs. They became oblivious to all else as they gave themselves up to this furious pursuit of a reward so dearly won. They ceased to notice the water streaming down and causing their limbs to swell, or the cramps brought on by being stuck in awkward positions, or the suffocating darkness that was making them go pale like vegetables in a cellar. As the day wore on, the atmosphere became even more poisonous and the air grew hotter and hotter with the fumes from their lamps, and the foulness of their breath, and the asphyxiating firedamp, which clung to their eyes like cobwebs and which would clear only when the mine was ventilated during the night. But despite it all, buried like moles beneath the crushing weight of the earth, and without a breath of fresh air in their burning lungs, they simply went on tapping.”

WorkNobleHardship
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“What misery! and all these girls, broken by fatigue, were silly enough to come here at night and make babies, more flesh to toil and suffer! It would never end while they went on getting themselves filled with starvelings.Ought they rather not stop up their wombs and close their thighs tight against approaching disaster? But then, perhaps he was only harbouring these dismal thoughts because he resented being alone, when all the others were pairing off to take their pleasure.”

LonelinessAntinatalismSlave Morality
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“Yes, all you French workers have that one idea: you want to dig up a treasure and live on it for evermore in selfish and lazy isolation. You make a great song against the rich, but when fortune give you some money you haven't the guts to give it back to the poor. You will never deserve to be happy so long as you have personal possessions, and your hatred of the bourgeois simply comes from your mad desire to be bourgeois yourselves in their place!”

PoorRichBourgeois
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“He would have given up everything -- education, comfort, luxurious life and his powerful position as manager -- if only just for one day he could have been the humblest of these poor devils under him and be free with his own body and be oafish enough to beat his wife and take his pleasure with the wives of his neighbors. He found himself wishing he were dying of starvation too, and that his empty belly were twisted with pains that made his brain reel, for perhaps that might deaden this relentless grief! Oh to live like a brute, possessing nothing but freedom to roam in the cornfields with the ugliest and most revolting haulage girl and possess her!”

Repressed EmotionsSexual Frustration
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“Etienne now commanded a view of the whole district. It was still very dark, but the old man had peopled the darkness with untold sufferings, which the young one could sense all round him in the limitless space. Could he not hear a cry of famine borne over this bleak country by the March wind? The gale had lashed itself into a fury and seemed to be blowing death to all labour and a great hunger that would finish off men by the hundred. And with his roving eye he tried to peer through the gloom, with a tormenting desire to see and yet a fear of seeing. Everything slid away in the dark unknown, and all he could see was distant furnaces and coke-ovens which, set in batteries of a hundred chimneys arranged obliquely, made sloping lines of crimson flames; whilst further to the left the two blast-furnaces were burning blue in the sky like monstrous torches. It was as depressing to watch as a building on fire: as far as the threatening horizon the only stars which rose were the nocturnal fires of the land of coal and iron.”

MiseryDesolationCoal Mining
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