The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner is I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. Furthermore, it's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists.

— Émile Zola

The thought is a deed. Of all deeds she fertilizes the world most.

— Émile Zola

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity.

— Émile Zola

They again kissed each other and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be assuming the shape of a terrified eye, that stared wildly and fixedly upon the pale, slumbering couple who reeked with crime beneath their very sheets, and dreamt they could see a rain of blood falling in big drops, which turned into golden coins as they plashed upon the floor.

— Émile Zola

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

— Émile Zola

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

— Émile Zola

When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another's lips. Lovers are made by a kiss.

— Émile Zola

When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.

— Émile Zola

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?

— Émile Zola

With other women he had not been able to touch their flesh without experiencing the desire to devour it, as though ravenous with an abominable hunger to butcher them. But this one, could he then love her, and not kill her?

— Émile Zola