The Stranger: The Original Unabridged and Complete Edition (Albert Camus Classics)

by Albert Camus

It occurred to me that somehow I'd got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I'd be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed.

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.

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.

But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prisons as to innocent, untroubled sleep.

It wasn’t because I’d been condemned to death, he said, that he spoke to me in this way. In his opinion every man on the earth was under sentence of death.

It must make life unbearable for a man, to think as I did.

There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace.