La Bête Humaine Quotes
"Our civilization is still in a middle stage—scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason." - Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
"It is good that human muck should be raked like this from time to time in full view of the public."
"They held each other close, merging the awful sadness of their plights. For theirs was a suffering unto eternity, without prospect of oblivion or forgiveness. They wept together and felt the blind forces of life weighing upon them, a life of struggle and death."
"A person kills only from an impulse that springs from his blood and sinews, from the vestiges of ancient struggles, from the need to live and the joy of being strong."
"It seemed a monstrous, unfeasible, impossible thing to do. Within him, the civilized human being was fighting back, with the strength derived from education, from the slowly erected and indestructible edifice of inherited ideas."
"Societies get the criminals they deserve."
"The social milieu is the mother culture of criminality; the microbe is the criminal, an element that gains significance only at the moment it finds the broth that makes it ferment."
"All that concerned him was the public face of the régime he served."
"The whole world passed by here, and not only French people, foreigners too, people from the furthest lands, since nowadays nobody seemed able to stay put at home any more."
"There are brutes among us, countless brutes. Christian though we be, and civilized, and literate, and artistic, we also experience feelings of hatred or love, of concupiscence or anger, feelings which come to us, as it were, from beyond ourselves; and we do not always know what makes us respond as we do."
"There are so many things one doesn’t want to do and yet which one does do, because in fact they’re the wisest thing one can do."
"But wild beasts are still wild beasts, and they can go on inventing bigger and better machines for as long as they like, there’ll still be wild beasts underneath there somewhere."
"It was all a jumble at that murky twilight hour, when it seemed as though everything should collide, and yet everything passed, and slid by, and emerged, all at the same gentle crawl, vaguely, in the depths of the dusk."
"Once, before, a man was run over, cut in two. In our time we’ve just had the one cow, it nearly derailed a train. Ah, the poor beast! They found the carcass here and the head over there, near the tunnel … With Flore about, you can sleep sound."
"People go fast now, they know more … But wild beasts are still wild beasts, and they can go on inventing bigger and better machines for as long as they like, there’ll still be wild beasts underneath there somewhere."
"I know how busy you are, I didn’t dare ask you to come. Well, and here you are, and I’ve ever so much to tell you!"
"What had she been thinking of, getting married again to a sly one like that, not a button to his name, and tight-fisted, and she five years older than him, with two daughters already, one of six, one of eight?"
"My God! so it had come back, the terrible affliction he had thought himself cured of? He had wanted to kill that girl back there! Kill a woman, kill a woman!"
"A sensation of icy coldness was already bringing him to his senses, and he threw them away, and fled, distraught; while she, her eyelids closed, thought that he was rejecting her because she had resisted him."
"That girl, he had wanted to kill that girl! It kept coming back to him, sharp, ghastly, as if the scissors had pierced his own flesh."
"Each time it was like a sudden attack of blind rage, some unquenchable thirst to avenge wrongs suffered in the distant past and yet which he could not precisely remember."
"He could feel, too, in the midst of his attacks, the need to do battle with the female, to conquer her, subjugate her, the perverted need to sling her dead body over his shoulder, like a prey snatched away from others, ever his."
"He was too ignorant, he thought, and his brain too numb with the anguish of a man driven to acts in which his will counted for nothing and for which the cause deep within him had vanished from view."
"He watched his fellow-workers—less qualified drivers of the third and second classes, and the men whom the Company trained itself, the fitters it took on as apprentices—he watched almost all of them marry other railway workers, faceless women who were only ever to be glimpsed, occasionally, at departure time, when they brought along their little baskets of provisions."
"He was only ever at peace, happy and cut off from the world, when he was on his engine."
"His pulse raced madly, and his violent itch to kill grew fiercer, like a sexual urge, at the sight of this sorry corpse."
"He made every effort to calm himself, he wanted to understand. How was he any different from the others?"
"It was over: the onlookers gradually melted away, and station life returned to normal."
"The bright sun was climbing in triumph above the morning mists, amid the great, limpid blueness of the sky."
"For three weeks this affair had been causing an enormous stir."
"His self-interest alone curbed his passion; he had such an overriding desire to obtain some decoration and be transferred to Paris."
"People like the Roubauds don’t go and kill someone like your father just to enter into their inheritance the sooner."
"I should have gone and slit his throat there and then!"
"She was pale and troubled, the biddable smile of seduction quite vanished."
"But Jacques, black with soot, drenched and exhausted from his struggle with the wind and the rain, simply looked at her with hard eyes."
"He was in less of a hurry to establish the truth."
"The magistrate, whose turn it was to be silent, glumly awaited the orders which he could sense were coming."
"It is sometimes a more heroic course to accept a lesser evil rather than to incur a greater one."
"The judiciary function had simply become a job like any other, a famished solicitant ever ready to bend the knee to the commands of the powers that be."
"We shall release him and continue to keep him under surveillance."
"Ah, those creatures, when they want something!"
"The truth was that he was now frequenting a small café on the Cours Napoléon, where he would meet Monsieur Cauche, the superintendent."
"He had loved her without delicacy, and she had resigned herself to it with the submissiveness of a compliant wife."
"Life until now had abused her with its blood and filth, and so violently that her beautiful blue eyes, though they retained their look of innocence, now stared in terror beneath the dark, dramatic helmet of her black hair."
"The pressure-gauge dropped, and he lifted the ratchet to open the firebox door."
"The scandalous Grandmorin affair, which there had been so much talk about, was now quietly being forgotten."
"Never had he exercised his imagination so greatly."
"It's as though the blood in his heart had turned thick with all the blood that had been spilled."
"For a moment she thought that he was going to hit her, for he had drawn near, spluttering that the money could rot where it was."
"Oh, you just can’t imagine, my love, you just can’t imagine how he treated me then!"
"It was as though I were paralysed, I was absolutely powerless to act."
"You’re the only man I love, I’ve never loved anyone but you."
"So why didn’t I even think of trying to prevent it? It was only later when I thought about it that I was surprised I hadn’t shouted from the window or pulled the communication cord."
"You do things you never thought you were capable of."
"When I think I wouldn’t even dare bleed a chicken!"
"That horrible blackness screaming inside me!"
"It seemed as if my husband were within his rights."
"He knew nothing about it, of course, and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him."
"I could scarcely make out anything in the room now, where the engulfing blackness of the night had swallowed up stove, furniture, and walls alike."
"He could not keep his eyes closed; some invisible hand seemed to insist on opening them again in the darkness."
"For a moment she tried having her hands outside the bedclothes; but they turned at once to ice, and made him shiver."
"Despite his overwhelming fatigue, his brain was still extraordinarily active, and he remained quiveringly alert as he unwound his single spool of thoughts over and over again."
"Then everything had sunk into a dark chasm, a nothingness beyond time and space, in which he had lain motionless, perhaps for centuries."
"She was sleeping very peacefully, breathing like a child in her exhaustion."
"Philoméne became more and more friendly towards Séverine, railing against Madame Lebleu whom she went round calling an old hag."
"He felt discouraged in his feelings of affection towards her: where was the good of loving if he was going to kill everything he loved?"
"Despite the darkness, Philoméne had sensed her giving her lover’s arm an affectionate squeeze at this prospect."
"When he finally took her mouth away, she had nothing left of her own self, and she felt as though her entire being had passed over into his."
"He felt as resolute as if he were standing in the helpful seclusion of a cut-throat’s alley."
"Murder would never be done by reasoning; it needed the instinct that makes the jaw snap, the leap that launches you on to the prey, and the hunger or the fury which tears it to pieces."
"The gradually accumulated, inherited notion of what is just."
"The tiny yellow tear-drops of the gas-lamps."
"Their eyes met in a gaze which seemed to her immeasurably long."
"Her eyes opened enormously wide, and a shadow of awful pain darkened her pale face."
"The inevitable was in place, nothing in the world could now prevent the collision."
"The dead had been removed, the blood wiped away; and people were on the move once more, bound towards the future."
"The sight of her brought it all back to him, the two blocks of stone across the line, the dreadful crash."
"She’d always been a law unto herself, and he’d forever had to leave his hut to go and shut the gate for her."
"Quite evidently he had had no other idea in his head for years, night or day, through the twelve long hours of his shift."
"Illiterate and dull-witted, he never read anything but just sat there, his hands dangling by his side, his eyes glazed and vacant, waiting to be summoned by his instruments."
"Today Jacques was astonished to find him quite unchanged. So one could kill without a tremor, and life went on as before."
"He kept seeing the dead woman’s staring eyes, and the hideous grin on her lips repeating: ‘Keep looking! Keep looking!’"
"Because now, for you and me, there’s just no way forward, we’re not going anywhere … Our dream of going away, the hope that we might be rich and content over there in America, all that happiness which depended on you, it’s impossible now, because you weren’t able ..."
"But there’s still someone else, there’s still Cabuche."
"This was what held his gaze, what haunted him, was the expression of appalling terror assumed in death by the face of this pretty, gentle, most docile of women."
"But Jacques listened in surprise. He could hear an animal snorting or was it the grunting of a wild boar, the roaring of a lion? Then his mind was set at rest, it was only the sound of his own breathing."
"Why destroy this piece of evidence, why burden his conscience with such an act, if it was the Empire’s fate to be swept away, like the pinch of black ash which had now fallen from his fingers?"
"Never, since it had been first converted into law courts, had the former palace of the Dukes of Normandy seen such a crowd."
"Why bother to tell the truth, since it was falsehood that was logical?"
"He would give his evidence as an innocent bystander; for since the crime he had not felt a single tremor, he had never even given the matter a second’s thought, his memory had been wiped clean, and his physical being was in a state of perfect equilibrium, of perfect health."
"An enormous feeling of compassion had taken hold of him, and he wept for her, copiously, oblivious to his crime, oblivious to where he was, amidst all these people."
"People were deeply moved at the sight of this lover’s pain while the husband sat there dry-eyed."
"The verdict accepted the plea of extenuating circumstances, and the bench sentenced the two men to hard labour for life."
"All over Rouen that evening the sentence was the subject of endless discussion and debate."
"In the midst of his tranquil state of equilibrium and the perfect state of health which he had been enjoying since the murder, he had just now, at table, sensed the return of a distant malaise every time this woman’s straying hands had touched him."
"There was nothing more to live for: all that remained ahead of him was this black night of limitless despair through which he was now fleeing."
"Their hatred was growing, and they were ready to tear each other to pieces within these few square feet, from which the slightest jolt could have sent them flying as they hurtled along at full speed."
"They were found later, decapitated, their feet severed, two bleeding trunks still locked together as though intent on squeezing the life out of each other."