The Stranger

by Albert Camus

On their way out, and much to my surprise, they all shook my hand—as if that night during which we hadn’t exchanged as much as a single word had somehow brought us closer together.

“If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.”

We didn’t say anything more from that point on.

I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so.

for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.

And from the peculiar little noise coming through the partition, I realized he was crying.

” I said yes but that really it was all the same to me. Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business. So I went back to work. I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.

I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to.

I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married.

I said we could do it whenever she wanted.

dog’s real sickness was old age, and there’s no cure for old age.

“I hope the dogs don’t bark tonight. I always think it’s mine.”

After that I didn’t pay any more attention to this mannerism of his, because I was absorbed by the feeling that the sun was doing me a lot of good.

It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.

To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.

I felt a blast of its hot breath strike my face, I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists in my trouser pockets, and strained every nerve in order to overcome the sun and the thick drunkenness it was spilling over me.

But most of the time, he was just a form shimmering before my eyes in the fiery air.

It was this burning, which I couldn’t stand anymore, that made me move forward.

Nevertheless I answered that I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself and that it was hard for me to tell him what he wanted to know.

I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

But I was tired of repeating the same story over and over. It seemed as if I had never talked so much in my life.

the fact that I had hesitated before I fired my second shot.

When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man.

Anyway, it was one of Maman’s ideas, and she often repeated it, that after a while you could get used to anything.

And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten.

Only the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” still had any meaning for me.

But at the same time, and for the first time in months, I distinctly heard the sound of my own voice. I recognized it as the same one that had been ringing in my ears for many long days, and I realized that all that time I had been talking to myself.

as if they were in a club where people are glad to find themselves among others from the same world.

And I had the odd impression of being watched by myself.

the first time in years I had this stupid urge to cry, because I could feel how much all these people hated me.

for the first time I realized that I was guilty.

“Here we have a perfect reflection of this entire trial: everything is true and nothing is true!”

but it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss a man.

naiveté of his esteemed colleague could fail to appreciate that between these two sets of facts there existed a profound, fundamental, and tragic relationship.

me. It took me a few minutes to understand the last part because he kept saying “his mistress” and to me she was Marie.

I thought his way of viewing the events had a certain consistency.

I was listening, and I could hear that I was being judged intelligent.

I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.

I didn’t have the right to show any feeling or goodwill.

Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun.

He went on like that, saying “I” whenever he was speaking about me. I was completely taken aback.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed.

a wave of poisoned joy rose in my throat. But I wasn’t being reasonable. It was a mistake to let myself get carried away by such imaginings, because the next minute I would get so cold that I would curl up into a ball under my blanket and my teeth would be chattering and I couldn’t make them stop.

I’d realized that the most important thing was to give the condemned man a chance.

you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on.

For a long time I believed—and I don’t know why—that to get to the guillotine you had to climb stairs onto a scaffold. I think it was because of the French Revolution—I mean, because of everything I’d been taught or shown about it. But one morning I remembered seeing a photograph that appeared in the papers at the time of a much-talked-about execution. In reality, the machine was set up right on the ground, as simple as you please.

You always get exaggerated notions of things you don’t know anything about.

I would listen to my heartbeat. I couldn’t imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. I’ve never really had much of an imagination.