An animated conversation was in progress and the woman behind the counter started airing her views about a murder case that had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach.
Our fellow-citizens, as they now realized, had never thought that our little town might be a place particularly chosen as one where rats die in the sun and concierges perish from peculiar illnesses.
Here is the faithful night, the cool night which I called for amid the noise of lights, drink and the tumult of desire.
The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
In the long run one gets used to anything.
I have always loved everything about you. Even what I didn’t understand.
Everyone gives much more and the receipts are considerable. Typical of American generosity. Their hospitality, their cordiality are like that too, spontaneous and without affectation. It’s what’s best in them.
Indeed, the one thing these prophecies had in common was that, ultimately, all were reassuring. Unfortunately, though, the plague was not.
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude that gives everything back its value. At a certain level of wealth, the heavens themselves and the star-filled night are nature’s riches.
As the death of the writer exaggerates the role of his work, the death of a person exaggerates the role of his effect on us.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.