The Stranger & The Fall & The Myth of Sisyphus (DLB edition)

by Albert Camus

“If you go too slowly there’s the risk of a heatstroke. But, if you go too fast, you perspire, and the cold air in the church gives you a chill.” I saw her point; either way one was in for it.

He then asked if a “change of life,” as he called it, didn’t appeal to me, and I answered that one never changed his way of life; one life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well.

lunch was a movable feast, you had it when you felt like it.

I explained that I didn’t believe in God. “Are you really so sure of that? ” I said I saw no point in troubling my head about the matter; whether I believed or didn’t was, to my mind, a question of so little importance.

“Have you no hope at all? Do you really think that when you die you die outright, and nothing remains?” I said: “Yes.” He dropped his eyes and sat down again. He was truly sorry for me, he said. It must make life unbearable for a man, to think as I did.

I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if Fd felt like it. I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why.

All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others’. And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end?