“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Crever pour crever, je préfère crever de passion que de crever d'ennui !”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Very well, sir. A woman's opinion, however humble she may be, is always worth listening to, if she's got any sense...If you put yourself in my hands, I shall certainly make a decent man of you.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“La certitude d'avoir empêche de désirer.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Never subject to the rules, believing that the correct judgement and healthy nature keep her in the honesty she lived in.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by a wavering faith, were replaced by this bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Women now came and spent their leisure time in his establishment, the shivering and anxious hours they formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, a growing struggle of the god of dress against the husband, the incessantly renewed religion of the body with the divine future of beauty.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Denise était venue à pied de la gare Saint-Lazare, où un train de Cherbourg l’avait débarquée avec ses deux frères, après une nuit passée sur la dure banquette d’un wagon de troisième classe. Elle tenait par la main Pépé, et Jean la suivait, tous les trois brisés du voyage, effarés et perdus, au milieu du vaste Paris, le nez levé sur les maisons, demandant à chaque carrefour la rue de la Michodière, dans laquelle leur oncle Baudu demeurait. Mais, comme elle débouchait enfin sur la place Gaillon, la jeune fille s’arrêta net de surprise.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Mais il avait oublié l’inventaire, il ne voyait pas son empire, ces magasins crevant de richesses. Tout avait disparu, les victoires bruyantes d’hier, la fortune colossale de demain. D’un regard désespéré, il suivait Denise, et quand elle eut passé la porte, il n’y eut plus rien, la maison devint noire.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“en lo más hondo de aquel empecinamiento, clamaba la rebelión del modesto fabricante artesano contra la invasora vulgaridad de los artículos de bazar.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Le había quedado, de los tiempos en los que soñaba con dedicarse a la literatura y se juntaba con poetas, una desesperación universal.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“no le había quedado más remedio que hacerse una confesión: aún temblaba al ver pasar a Mouret, pero ahora sabía que no era de miedo.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“Yo la quiero... Hace mucho que lo sabe. No juegue el juego cruel de fingir que no entiende... y no tema nada.”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“¿Pero es que no ve lo que estoy sufriendo?... Que estupidez, ¿verdad? ¡Sufro como un niño!”
― Émile Zola, quote from The Ladies' Paradise
“we all make assumptions about the world—based on individual experience and cultural background—that affect our judgment of how that balance should look”
― Sheena Iyengar, quote from The Art of Choosing
“Old Spice
Every Sunday afternoon he dresses in his old army uniform,
tells you the name of every man he killed.
His knuckles are unmarked graves.
Visit him on a Tuesday and he will describe
the body of every woman he could not save.
He’ll say she looked like your mother
and you will feel a storm in your stomach.
Your grandfather is from another generation–
Russian degrees and a school yard Cuban national anthem,
communism and religion. Only music makes him cry now.
He married his first love, her with the long curls down
to the small of her back. Sometimes he would
pull her to him, those curls wrapped around his hand
like rope.
He lives alone now. Frail, a living memory
reclining in a seat, the room orbiting around him.
You visit him but never have anything to say.
When he was your age he was a man.
You retreat into yourself whenever he says your name.
Your mother’s father,
“the almost martyr,
can load a gun under water
in under four seconds.
Even his wedding night was a battlefield.
A Swiss knife, his young bride,
his sobs as he held Italian linen between her legs.
His face is a photograph left out in the sun,
the henna of his beard, the silver of his eyebrows
the wilted handkerchief, the kufi and the cane.
Your grandfather is dying.
He begs you Take me home yaqay,
I just want to see it one last time;
you don’t know how to tell him that it won’t be
anything like the way he left it.”
― Warsan Shire, quote from Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
“If we want to give our children what they need to thrive, we must honor their basic nature- boyish or girlish, introverted or extroverted, wild or mellow.”
― Wendy Mogel, quote from The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Timeless Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children
“Happy endings are reserved strictly for the fiction shelves of bookstores”
― Holly Bourne, quote from Soulmates
“Twelve down, like a hundred thousand left to go.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Fate of Ten
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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