Albert Camus, The Plague

Rieux: I know now that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of a great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
Tarrou: One has the idea that he is capable of everything.
Rieux: I can’t agree; he’s incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he’s incapable of anything really worth while.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.

Albert Camus, The Plague

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

Albert Camus, The Plague

Albert Camus, The Plague

Rieux: Out with it, Tarrou! What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?
Tarrou: I don’t know. My code of morals, perhaps.
Rieux: Your code of morals? What code?
Tarrou: Comprehension.”

Albert Camus, The Plague

Rieux: Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.
Tarrou: Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.
Rieux: Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.
Tarrou: No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean for you.
Rieux: Yes. A never ending defeat.
Tarrou: Who taught you all this, doctor?
Rieux: Suffering.

Why do you yourself show such devotion, considering you don’t believe in God?

Albert Camus, The Plague

This was, indeed, the hour when he could feel surest she was wholly his. Till four in the morning one is seldom doing anything and at that hour, even if the night has been a night of betrayal, one is asleep. Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again.

Albert Camus, The Plague

One grows out of pity when it’s useless.

Albert Camus, The Plague

No, you can’t understand. You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.

Albert Camus, The Plague

Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose. Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had a savor only of regret. For they would have wished to add to it all that they regretted having left undone, while they might yet have done it, with the man or woman whose return they now awaited; just as in all the activities, even the relatively happy ones, of their life as prisoners they kept vainly trying to include the absent one. And thus there was always something missing in their lives. Hostile to the past, impatient of the present and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars. Thus the only way of escaping from that intolerable leisure was to set the trains running again in one’s imagination and in filling the silence with the fancied tinkle of a doorbell, in practice obstinately mute.

Albert Camus, The Plague

Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.

Albert Camus, The Plague

At the height of the epidemic we saw only one case in which natural emotions overcame the fear of death in a particularly painful form. It was not, as might be expected, the case of two young people, whose passion made them yearn for each other’s nearness at whatever cost of pain. The two were old Dr. Castel and his wife, and they had been married for very many years. Mme. Castel had gone on a visit to a neighboring town some days before the epidemic started. They weren’t one of those exemplary married couples of the Darby-and-Joan pattern; on the contrary, the narrator has grounds for saying that, in all probability, neither partner felt quite sure the marriage was all that could have been desired. But this ruthless, protracted separation enabled them to realize that they could not live apart, and in the sudden glow of this discovery the risk of plague seemed insignificant.

Albert Camus, The Plague

Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces?

Albert Camus, The Plague

Albert Camus, The Plague

Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time?
Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while.
Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.”

The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in, though he had much liking for his fellow men and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth.

Albert Camus, The Plague