The Outsider Quotes

“Court was adjourned. As I was led to the police car, I briefly recognized the scent and colour of a summer’s evening. From the darkness of my moving prison, I rediscovered, one by one – as if arising from the depths of my weariness – all the familiar sounds of the city that I loved, and that particular moment of the day when I had sometimes felt happy. The shouts of the newspaper sellers in the calm night air, the last few birds in the town square, the people selling sandwiches, the creaking of the trams along the high bends of the city and the slight breeze from above before night suddenly falls over the port – to me, all these things merged to form the journey of a blind man, a journey I’d known so well before going to prison. Yes, this was the time of day when, a very long time ago, I had felt happy. A time when I could look forward to a night of peaceful sleep, devoid of dreams. But now, all that had changed; as I waited for the new day to dawn, I found myself back in my cell. It was as if the familiar paths etched in the summer skies could just as easily lead to prison as to innocent sleep.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“You always get exaggerated notion of the things you don't know nothing about it.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“And I as well, I too felt ready to start life all over again. As if this great release of anger had purged me of evil, emptied me of hope; and standing before this symbolic night bursting with stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world. To feel it so like me, so like a brother, in fact, I understood that I had been happy, and I was still happy. So that it might be finished, so that I might feel less alone, I could only hope there would be many, many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hatred.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“People always have exaggerated ideas about unfamiliar things.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“I had only one impression: I was standing in front of a row of seats on a tram and all the anonymous passengers were looking up and down at the person who had just got on, to see what was contemptible about him.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“So between the hours spent sleeping, remembering things, reading my story and watching the light fade into darkness and then grow light again, the time passed. I’d read somewhere that people ended up losing their notion of time in prison. But that made little sense to me. I didn’t understand how the days could be so long and yet so short. Long to get through, of course, but so distended that they ended up running into each other, so the names of the days of the week got lost. ‘Yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ were the only words that meant anything to me.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“At the same time, I tried to concentrate so I would have a complete inventory. I became such an expert at this that by the end of a few weeks I could spend hours simply listing everything in my bedroom. The more I thought about it, the more things came back to me, things I hadn’t noticed before or had forgotten. I realized then that a man who had only lived for a single day could easily live a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from getting bored. In one respect, it was an advantage.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider

“Then, speaking very quickly and passionately, he told me that he believed in God, that he was positive that no man was so guilty that God could not forgive him, but that in order to be forgiven the man must repent and once more become a child whose soul is bare and prepared to accept everything.”
― Albert Camus, The Outsider