The Plague

by Albert Camus

The seasons are discriminated only in the sky.

The aspect of the sea, too, changed; its dark-blue translucency had gone and, under the lowering sky, it had steely or silvery glints that hurt the eyes to look at.

Yes, in conclusion, the patient’s life hung on a thread, and three people out of four (he remembered the exact figures) were too impatient not to make the very slight movement that snapped the thread.

Also he had the walk of a shy young priest, sidling along walls and slipping mouse-like into doorways,

Some minutes later, as he was driving down a back street redolent of fried fish and urine, a woman screaming in agony, her groin dripping blood, stretched out her arms toward him.

they could not live apart, and in the sudden glow of this discovery the risk of plague seemed insignificant.

we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.

And they fed their despondency with fleeting intimations, messages as disconcerting as a flight of swallows,

I’m not happy to go, but one needn’t be happy to make another start.”

You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.”

One grows out of pity when it’s useless. And in this feeling that his heart had slowly closed in on itself, the doctor found a solace, his only solace, for the almost unendurable burden of his days.