I hadn’t grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, but so distended that they ended up by overlapping on each other. In fact, I never thought of days as such; only the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ still kept some meaning.
Literatura. Desconfiar de esta palabra. No apresurarse a pronunciarla.
Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.
There is something divine in mindless beauty.
Love is injustice, but justice doesn’t suffice.
Tell me about yourselves and describe the sun to a miserable wretch who has no roots anywhere and who remains your faithful.
So I learned that after a single day’s experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison.
People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.
It was not a matter, mind you, of the certainty I had of being more intelligent than everyone else. Besides, such certainty is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it.
Then she said she wondered if she really loved me or not. I, of course, couldn’t enlighten her as to that. And, after another silence, she murmured something about my being “a queer fellow.” “And I daresay that’s why I love you,” she added. “But maybe that’s why one day I’ll come to hate you.
El mundo no puede ofrecer ya nada al hombre angustiado.
Deepest thoughts and major works eventually become insignificant.
In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: ‘God is great and good. Come unto Him.’ On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.
So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.
Ah, mon cher, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves. Just try.
A natural balcony fifteen hundred feet above a sea still visible bathed in sunlight, on the other hand, was the place where I could breathe most freely, especially if I were alone, well above the human ants.
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.