The Plague

by Albert Camus

stayed: one can sometimes suffer for a long time without knowing it.

‘I have been very fond of you, but now I am tired … I am not happy to go away, but one does not need to be happy to start again.’

‘You understand, doctor. At a pinch, it is easy enough to choose between but and and. It already becomes more difficult to opt for and or then. The difficulty grows with then and afterwards. But what is surely hardest of all is to decide whether one should put and or not.’

‘Ah! If only it had been an earthquake! A good shake and that’s it … One counts the dead, one counts the living and the whole thing’s over and done with. But this rotten bastard of a disease! Even those who don’t have it, carry it in their hearts.’

He could not stand the sight of a watch and, indeed, had not a single one in his house. ‘A watch’, he would say, ‘is expensive and stupid.’ He judged time, especially mealtimes – the only ones that really mattered to him – by his two saucepans, one of which was full of peas when he woke up. He filled the other, pea by pea, with a single, regular and assiduous movement. In this way he found his bearings through a day measured saucepan by saucepan. ‘Every fifteen pans,’ he said, ‘I need a snack. It’s quite simple.’

God certainly did not exist since, if he did, there would be no need for priests.

The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer’s soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.

Of course one could always try not to see, cover one’s eyes and reject the obvious, but it has a terrible force that eventually carries all before it.

‘Of course, it’s not getting any better, but at least everyone is in the same boat.’

a man who is suffering from a great illness or a great fear is automatically relieved of all other illnesses or anxieties. “Have you noticed,” he asked me, “that you cannot accumulate illnesses? Suppose you have a serious or incurable disease, a serious cancer or a good bout of TB, you will never catch plague or typhus; it’s impossible. Moreover, it goes further than that, because you never see a cancer victim die in a car accident.”

the only way not to be separated from others was, in the end, to have a clear conscience; but he gave me a wicked look and said: “Well, on that score, no one is ever with anybody.”