The Stranger: The Original Unabridged and Complete Edition (Albert Camus Classics)
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After some minutes the local picture houses disgorged their audiences.
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I told him I was quite prepared to go; but really I didn't care much one way or the other.
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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.
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" dingy sort of town, to my mind. Masses of pigeons and dark courtyards. And the people have washed-out, white faces."
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He was rather slow of speech and had, I noticed, a habit of saying "and what's more" between his phrases—even when the second added nothing really to the first. Talking of Marie, he said: "She's an awfully pretty girl, and what's more, charming."
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Usually, however, I didn’t think things out so far. Those first months were trying, of course, but the very effort I had to make helped me through them.
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And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before.
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I fell to thinking about Marie. She hadn’t written for ages; probably, I surmised, she had grown tired of being the mistress of a man sentenced to death. Or she might be ill, or dead. After all, such things happen.
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it was better to bum than to disappear.
Ross Cournoyer
*burn
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He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into—just as it had got its teeth into me. I’d been right, I was still right, I was always right.
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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. He, too, knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through.
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.