The Stranger

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.

All normal people, I added as an afterthought, had more or less desired the death of those they loved, at some time or another.

in the long run one gets used to anything.

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 is always interesting, even in the prisoner's dock, to hear oneself being talked about. Certainly, in the speeches of my lawyer and the prosecuting counsel, a great deal was said about me; more, in fact, about me personally than about my crime.

I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back.

"it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow."

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.

whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!

Supposing she were dead, her memory would mean nothing; I couldn't feel an interest in a dead girl. This seemed to me quite normal; just as I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.

I explained that I didn't believe in God. "Are you really so sure of that?" I said I saw no point in troubling my head about the matter; whether I believed or didn't was, to my mind, a question of so little importance.

Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others' And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didn't weep at his mother's funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end? The same thing for Salamano's wife and for Salamano's dog.

And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. 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.