"Zola" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dwelt in that country where Anna Karenina and the Levins were the only people who mattered much. We have all known that intoxicating period when we thought we "understood life," because we had read Daudet, Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and like Mr. Howells we all looked back rather fondly upon the time when we believed that books were the truth and art was all. After a while books grow matter of fact like everything else and we always ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... "Therese Raquin," was Zola's third book, but it was the one that first gave him notoriety, and made him somebody, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... years when dogmatic naturalism, with its systematically crude presentation of life, was at its height in France, and France, during the nineteenth century, had more often than not set the fashion for Spain in literary matters. The baldness of Zola and the pessimism of de Maupassant were quickly taken up on the French stage, and Henri Becque and the Thtre libre served slices of raw life to audiences fascinated by a tickling horror. The same naturalism had, indeed, crossed the Pyrenees and found ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... Socrates or Thomas Carlyle; nor did he feel within him the voice of a prophetic mission. The virtue of his writings consists in their wholesome ethical quality, in their solid health. Fresh air is often better for the soul than the swinging of the priest's censer. At a time when the school of Zola was at its climax, Stevenson opened the windows and let in the pleasant breeze. For the morbid and unhealthy period of adolescence, his books are more healthful than many serious moral works. He purges the mind of uncleanness, just as ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hurlingham, and because I have never read Mrs. Humphrey Ward's treatises! The world is even surprised when Mr. Gladstone is found to have been born in several places at the same time—as if he would be born at different times!—and M. Zola turns out to be crazily respectable. When is the ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... lived Commodore Nicholson, and in another lived Admiral Radford, whose lovely daughter, Sophy, became the bride of Valdemar de Meisner, secretary of the Russian Legation. In Number Four, lived Mrs. Zola Green with her daughter and her two sisters, named Pyle—one of them was called Miss "Chit-Chat." Mr. Green, who was a descendant of Uriah Forrest, had been given the name of Oceola after the Indian Chief who had saved the life of his father years ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... was an area of concentrated destruction. The wilderness swelled outwards, becoming twelve miles wide at parts. Tens of thousands of shells had pocked the dirty soil, scores of mine explosions had cratered it. Only the pen of a Zola could describe adequately the zone's intense desolation, as seen from the air. Those ruins, suggestive of abandoned scrap-heaps, were formerly villages. They had been made familiar to the world through matter-of-fact reports ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... unwilling to appear before the public. You insisted absolutely. What I foresaw has happened. The result of the performance has surpassed my anticipations. A critic pretended that I played Virginie of L'Assommoir instead of Dona Clorinde of L'Aventuriere. May Emile Augier and Zola absolve me! It is my first rebuff at the Comedie; it shall be my last. I warned you on the day of the dress rehearsal. You have gone too far. I keep my word. By the time you receive this letter I shall have left Paris. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... to follow it, and no one knows who invents the constant new changes. The slang of the boarding-house in Balzac's "Pere Goriot" is quite different from that of the novels done by the Goncourt brothers; and, though I have not yet mustered courage to finish one of M. Zola's outrages, I can see that the vulgarisms which he has learned are not at all like any that have been used in bygone days. The corruption of Paris seems to breed verbal distortions rather freely, and the ordinary babble of the city workman ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe come up for ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... superior polish and setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the very latest type, such as Zola's Debacle, which contains a very strong and pervading mixture ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... (E.C. Clayton, Queens of Song, vol. i, pp, 52-61; F. Karsch, "Mademoiselle Maupin," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. v, 1903, pp. 694-706.) A still greater writer, Flaubert, in Salammbo (1862) made his heroine homosexual. Zola has described sexual inversion in Nona and elsewhere. Some thirty years ago a popular novelist, A. Belot, published a novel called Mademoiselle Giraud, ma Femme, which was much read; the novelist took ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... able to gratify their taste for that graphic and faithful description of manners and characters, which in other centuries put the moralists into fashion. Realism never disappears altogether from French literature: it was at that moment all-powerful. Zola was coming to the front with the first volumes of the well-known 'Rougon-Macquart' and Daudet in 1874 entered on the same path, though in a different spirit, with 'Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine.' The success was immediate and immense. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the impossibility of a scene in Zola's Pot Bouille in which the so-called "lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... doubt in the mind of the judicial critic that in the pages of "A Love Episode" the reader finds more of the poetical, more of the delicately artistic, more of the subtle emanation of creative and analytical genius, than in any other of Zola's works, with perhaps one exception. The masterly series of which this book is a part furnishes a well-stocked gallery of pictures by which posterity will receive vivid and adequate impressions of life in France ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... period when like hell you could not mention the name of Zola to ears polite, no one ventured to argue the matter. Mrs. Rushworth's plump faded lips quivered helplessly, and it was with a gush of gratitude that she seized the hand of one of the ladies who rose to take her leave, and save the situation. The little spell of shock was broken. Groups resumed their ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Wordsworth, once, too, a torch of revolution, turning to his Michaels and his leech-gatherers and his Peter Bells. Her exquisite pictures of pastoral life are idealizations of it; her representations of the peasant are not corroborated by Zola's; to the last she approaches the shield of human nature from the golden side. But for herself at least she has found a real secret of happiness in country life, tranquil work, and a right direction given to her own heart ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... et le Noir a novel? If Monte Christo is a novel, is l'Assommoir? Can any conclusive comparison be drawn between Goethe's Elective Affinities, The Three Mousqueteers, by Dumas, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, M. de Camors by Octave Feuillet, and Germinal, by Zola? Which of them all is The Novel? What are these famous rules? Where did they originate? Who laid them down? And in virtue of what principle, of whose authority, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... composer. By critics who pretend to advanced views he has been greeted as the rightful successor of Wagner, while the conservative party in music have not hesitated to stigmatise him as a wearisome impostor. 'Kerim' (1887), his first work, passed almost unnoticed. 'Le Reve,' an adaptation of Zola's novel, was produced in 1891 at the Opera Comique, and in the same year was performed in London. The scene is laid in a French cathedral city. The period is ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... lust-spotted world. The play is a trenchant satire on the evils of society. Such realistic pictures of the things that are, but should not be, have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from Aristophanes to Zola, and Measure for Measure is one of the most disagreeable of Shakespeare's plays. But no ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Rousseau's direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoi and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces upon American imaginative writing during the last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was indebted to Zola for the scheme of that uncompleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat; and Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon experience of our younger writing men in confessing that the impulse toward writing ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... The beginnings are stories of the peasants of the fertile plain round about Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdy violent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled in Europe. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking from him a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitable murder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses that life vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... youth who had scarcely passed his majority, this book has been compared with Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" and Zola's "La Debacle," and with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison with Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so. Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... and the younger Dumas made her the heroine of one of his brightest comedies, "La Petite Americaine." There was one man, however, whom our heroine would not suffer to be introduced to her; that man was Zola. She would never recognize in her list of acquaintances, so she told Gounod with an angry stamp of her tiny foot, any man who debased his God-given talents ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... in no sense epoch. making. His dramas are negligible. His more serious novels, Madelon (1863), L'infame (1867), the three that form the trilogy of the Vieille Roche (1866), and Le roman d'un brave homme (1880)—-a kind of counterblast to the view of the French workman presented in Zola's Assommoir—-contain striking and amusing scenes, no doubt, but scenes which are often suggestive of the stage, while description, dissertation, explanation too frequently take the place of life. His best work after all is to be found ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... among American writers. The book called "The Black Riders" contains a number of moods that are unique in their suggestiveness and originality. Being without rime or meter, the lines oppose almost as many difficulties to a musician as the works of Walt Whitman; and yet, as Alfred Bruneau has set Zola's prose to music, so some brave American composer will find inspiration abundant in the works of ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola's descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction will be carried ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... despondency. Without taking into account this new mood, it is vain to try to understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought, politics. The one word "despair" is the key that opens up the meaning of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... of realism is suggested by the names Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. These young writers, influenced by the French novelist Zola, condemned the old romance as false and proclaimed, somewhat grandly at first, that they would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then they straightway forgot that health and moral sanity are the truth of life, and proceeded to deal with degraded or degenerate ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... midsummer nights, of fond lovers led through devious paths to happiness by Puck; of virtuous dukes—one finds such in fairyland; of fate subdued by faith and gentleness. But may we not also, in our more serious humours, find satisfaction in thinking with Hamlet or Coriolanus? May not both Dickens and Zola have their booths in Vanity Fair? If literature is to be a help to us, as well as a pastime, it must deal with the ugly as well as with the beautiful; it must show us ourselves, not as we wish to appear, but as ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... happiness such a world is far better than the actual world. In the latter case he is generally more or less unhappy, for he is compelled to see the world as it really is, and he finds it not all nice. The realistic small boy can have very little true happiness. Fancy M. Zola's childhood: assuming, of course, that he was then a Realist, which he probably was not, judging from the fact that he is only a Realist professionally at the present day. To the childish Zola, life must have presented ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a course in philosophy, "one would expect the Russian, in the conditions under which he lives, possessing an artistic temperament combined with a paralysis of the initiative and a sense of fate, to write in that way. And the Frenchmen, Renan, Zola, and the others who have followed, are equally deterministic, but viewing the human body as a highly organized machine with which we may amuse ourselves by registering its sensations. These literatures are true in so far ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... incalculable fashion, of the whole group—that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these "marine stores" of detail and document into real books. But he did not always, and could not always, quite do it: and he remains, with Zola, the chief example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia. Still, his greatest books, which are probably It ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... I remember it) of about an hour and a half; but I passed no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The phrase hardly applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town quelconque, as M. Zola would say. Small, peaceful, rustic, it stands in the midst of the great dairy-feeding plains of Bresse, of which fat county, sometime property of the house of Savoy, it was the modest capital. The blue masses of the Jura give ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... one of the few persons who can handle pitch without being defiled by it. While he runs Zola close as a realist, his thoughts and language are as pure as those of Miss ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... ecclesiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her benefit—Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"—a literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our nature, and which, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... part of that work euphuism is much less prominent than in the first. The romance of chivalry and the Italian tale would be still more distasteful to the new woman than they were to the new courtier. Doubtless Boccaccio may have found a place in many a lady's secret bookshelf as Zola and Guy de Maupassant do perchance to-day, but he was scarcely suitable for the boudoir table or for polite literary discussion. Something was needed which would appeal at once to the feminine taste for learning and to the desire for delicacy and refinement. This want was only ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... hypocrisy of the higher classes. George Sand, with her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as Paradise is from the Inferno. There is an echo of Rousseau's gospel of nature in all these tales, and the same optimistic delusion regarding "the people" for which the eighteenth ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen |
