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Théresè Raquin

...in deciding to study 'temperaments' rather than 'charaters', Zola was prevented by his materialism from imparting to his pair of passionate malefactors the kind of human appeal which is normally a necessity if a novelists is to compel his readers interest.

...to give the illusion of reality, the characters a novelist invents must not appear to be utterly at the mercy of their own 'temperments'[sic.]: few of us are throughgoing fatalists, and we do not recognize our fellows in beings who have no hand at all in the guiding to their destinies. p38-39 Zola-Hemmings

"What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen." Evelyn Waugh

What are people left with in fairy tales after their three wishes have come true? What becomes, in the morning, of all the gold obtained in the night from the lame man? It turns into a slab of clay, or a handful of dust. The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.

p73

Why is it so easy to turn young people into killers? Why do they look on human life with such criminal frivolity. This is particularly

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true in those fateful periods when blood flows and murder becomes an ordinary everyday thing. We were set on our fellow like dogs, and the whole pack of us licked the hunter's hand, squealing incomprehensibly.

p107

It seems to me that for any artist eternity is something tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible. What causes anguish in an artist is not longing for eternity, but a temporary loss of his feeling that every second of time is, in its fullness and density, the equal of eternity itself.

p143

The death of an artist is never a random event, but a last act of creation that seems to illuminate the whole of his life under a powerful ray of light.

p157

In the first stage the lips move soundlessly, then they begin to whisper and at last the inner music resolves itself into units of meaning: the recollection is developed like the image on a photographic plate.

p187