The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities.

— Émile Zola

The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.

— Émile Zola

The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.

— Émile Zola

The festivity had reached that apogee of joy when you face the happy fate of being crushed to death.

— Émile Zola

The more grievous the sin, the greater the repentance, God was bidding His time.

— Émile Zola

The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.

— Émile Zola

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

— Émile Zola

There Alpine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberose exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Alpine was dead.

— Émile Zola

Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! In a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nobility!

— Émile Zola

The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascan tannin tree with wide, box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. At a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the reflected yellow light of the sunset in the little boudoir, Renée, her mind wandering, her mouth dry and parched, took between her lips a sprig of the tannin tree that was level with her mouth, and sank her teeth into one of its bitter leaves.

— Émile Zola