Emile was a French novelist who wrote in the late 1800’s.  He’s been dead for over 100 years but he continues to reach human beings.

What remains after we’re gone?  I think our Spirit still floats in the air.  And then there are our words …

I’ve just spent half-an-hour searching for things that Emile Zola said.  I couldn’t stop.  There were words after words that touched me.  Now I’ve accumulated seventeen quotes!  Who among you will read all that?  On the other hand, perhaps a few will find one thought among seventeen that gives you pause.

Let’s find out …

We are like books.  Most people see only our cover.  The minority read only the introduction.  Many people believe the critics.  Few will know our content.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

Respectable people … What bastards!

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

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

Sometimes she was seized with hallucinations and thought she was buried in some vault together with a lot of puppet-like corpses which nodded their heads and moved their legs and arms when you pulled the strings.

While the storm was erupting, she stayed, staring at it, watching the shafts of lightning, like someone who could see serious things, far away in the future in these sudden flashes of light.

Living in musty shadows and dismal, oppressive silence, Thérèse could see her whole life stretching out before her totally void, bringing night after night the same cold bed and morning after morning the same empty day.

She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing if you couldn’t give yourself?

They have so smothered me in their middle-class refinement that I don’t know how there can be any blood left in my veins.  I lowered my eyes, put on a dismal, silly expression, just like them.  I was just as dead-and-alive as they were.

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.

He wept for truth which was dead, for heaven which was void.  Beyond the marble walls and gleaming jewelled altars, the huge plaster Christ had no longer a single drop of blood in its veins.

The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it.

A horribly bitter taste came into his mouth: the futility of everything, the eternal pain of existence.

There Albine 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 tuberoses 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, Albine was dead.