“Her pride in self-abnegation had left her, and she accepted that her loved ones could find happiness without her help.”
Source: 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.”
Source: 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.”
Source: The Bright Side of Life
“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.”
Source: Nana
“«Come vedi», continuò «tutti i mezzi conosciuti sono malvagi».”
Source: 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.”
Source: Desperate Characters
“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.”
Source: 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.”
Source: The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age
“Brotherhood is a VERB!”
Source: Brotherhood is a VERB!: Not Just Another Damn Leadership Book
“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. »”
Source: Paris Vécu - 1ère série: Rive Droite