The Stranger

by Albert Camus

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.

Then she remarked that marriage was a serious matter. To which I answered: "No."

He and his wife had never hit it off very well, but they'd got used to each other, and when she died he felt lonely.

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

The light seemed thudding in my head and I couldn't face the effort needed to go up the steps and make myself amiable to the women. But the heat was so great that it was just as bad staying where I was, under that flood of blinding light falling from the sky. To stay, or to make a move—it came to much the same.

I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

But it was up to me to bring my nerves to heel and steady my mind; for, even in considering this possibility, I had to keep some order in my thoughts, so as to make my consolations, as regards the first alternative, more plausible. When I'd succeeded, I had earned a good hour's peace of mind; and that, anyhow, was something.

really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

But, though I mightn't be so sure about what interested me, I was absolutely sure about what didn't interest me. And the question he had raised didn't interest me at all.

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.

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.