Quotes

"I want to show how a family, a small group of beings, behaves within society as it blossoms and gives birth to ten, to twenty individuals who appear, at first glance, profoundly unlike one another, but whom analysis shows to be intimately linked. Heredity has its laws, just as gravity does."

"It seemed to her that she was in the Corpus Christi procession, and that she was carrying the banner of the Virgin."

"Just as it had restored the fortunes of the Bonapartes, the coup d'état was founding the fortune of the Rougons."

"Paris was theirs. They had taken it by storm, like an enemy city being looted."

"Paris belongs to me. All I need to do is bend down and scoop up the gold."

"Le Paradou was a sea of greenery, so vast and deep that one might have said the world ended there."

"He loved power for power's sake, with the brutality of a strong man's appetite."

"What I wanted was to work in peace, always have bread, a clean corner to sleep in... and to die in my own bed."

"The dram-shop in the Rue de la Goutte-d'Or was a great devil of a machine for making the people drunk."

"I do not ask to be happy, dear God. I only ask not to suffer."

"She was like a setting sun setting the whole horizon ablaze. Men fell before her like corn before the scythe."

"Woman is the great mainspring of the machine. Flatter her, drive her to distraction — and you have everything."

"Au Bonheur des Dames blazed like a palace of dreams, overflowing with every seduction."

"Men were pushing up, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would crack the earth asunder."

"We are too wretched — it has to end."

"We are the ones who made the wealth of the world, and we are the ones who starve for it."

"The mine devoured everything — men, families, hope."

"The land did not die. It remained there, silent, in its eternity."

"He could not help himself, and something in him could not help itself either — something ancestral and bestial that shook him to his foundations."

"Heredity is not fatality. The will can do everything."