For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.
The furious revolt of the first weeks had given place to a vast despondency, not to be taken for resignation, though it was no the less a sort of passive and provisional acquiescence.
Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.
We must all know that each mediocrity, each surrender, each act of complacency will harm us as much as the enemy’s rifles.
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.
You think about bathing in the sea – thick as velvet, supple and smooth as a wild animal. You think about swimming naked, and at night, with the stars, and a friend. Swim till you’re far from the world, and breathing together in the same rhythm, and free of absolutely everything.
He started out by saying that people were describing me as a taciturn and withdrawn person and he wanted to know what I thought. I answered, It’s just that I don’t have much to say. So I keep quiet.
Indeed, one had the impression that even for the sufferers the frantic terror of the early phase had passed, and there was a sort of mournful resignation in their present attitude toward the disease.
From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him his own heart.
Don’t lies in the end put us on the path to truth? And don’t my stories, true or false, point to the same conclusion? Don’t they have the same meaning? So, what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in either case, they signify what I have been and what I am? One can sometimes see more clearly in a person who is lying than in one who is telling the truth. Like light, truth dazzles. Untruth, on the other hand, is a beautiful dusk that enhances everything.
I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
If I try to reach myself, it is at the bottom of this light. And if I try to understand and savor this delicate taste which reveals the secret of the world, it is myself that I find at the depth of the universe. Myself, that is to say, this extreme emotion which frees me from my surroundings.
Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.
If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death.
Yes, their reasons are overwhelming. They are as big as hope and as deep as revolt. They are the reasons of the future for a country that others tried so long to limit to the gloomy rumination of her past.
A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.
Day after day, Mersault let himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into water. And just as the swimmer advances by the complicity of his arms and the water which bears him up, helps him on, it was enough to make a few essential gestures – to rest one hand on a tree trunk, to take a run on the beach – in order to keep himself intact and conscious.
Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotations wrong.
Thus he became one with a life in its pure state, he rediscovered a paradise given only to the most private or the most intelligent animals. At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love.
Le nombre de mauvais romans ne doit pas faire oublier la grandeur des meilleurs.