Émile Zola
2 books by Émile Zola to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
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Germinal
A new resident of a poor coal mining town in 1860s France begins learning about socialist principles, and convinces the town to go on strike.
178,605 words, about 13 hours
Then
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His Masterpiece
A groundbreaking painter struggles to leave his mark on the bohemian art world of 19th-century Paris.
145,187 words, about 10 hours
Émile Zola quotes
Over the open plain, beneath a starless sky as dark and thick as ink, a man walked alone along the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, a straight paved road ten kilometres in length, intersecting the beetroot fields.
Claude had an instinctive distrust of women—that story of an accident, of a belated train and a brutal cabman, seemed to him a ridiculous invention.
“Eh? all that belong to? Nobody knows. To people.”
The day would come when one carrot, originally rendered, would lead to a revolution.
It seemed to them more sheltered in the earth, from which a race of miners, generations of starving people, extracted it for them, a little every day, as they needed it.
When the light went down like this on the crisis of a bad day’s work, it seemed to Claude as if the sun would never rise again, but had forever carried life and all the jubilant gaiety of colour away.
The Curé of Montsou, Abbé Joire, was passing, holding up his cassock, with the delicate air of a fat, well-nourished cat afraid of wetting its fur.
Ah! life! life! to feel it and portray it in its reality, to love it for itself, to behold in it the only real, lasting, and changing beauty, without any idiotic idea of ennobling it by mutilation.
“A Thebaid! a real land of milk and honey!” murmured the gentleman in delight.
And it was his picture that was being laughed at.
It was the wan and deathly melancholy of a funeral.
“Ah! how they amused me, the idiots!” exclaimed Claude, in a last burst. “Do you know, I wouldn’t take a hundred thousand francs for my day’s pleasure!”
“I am thirsty when I eat.”
“Well,” replied the painter without hesitation, “it looks like it since I’m with my wife.”
Sunday upset the hours for rising, even among the Maheus.
“How idiotic it is! a soul for every one of us, when there is that big soul there!”
Since the good God was dead, justice would assure the happiness of men, and equality and brotherhood would reign.
Ah! misery, how discouraging it was!
“Hippolyte, before we go into the drawing-room just open the windows and let in a little air.”
A dream of eternal friendship made him changeless.