The Plague

By Albert Camus QUOTATION: One grows out of pity when it’s useless.
ATTRIBUTION: Albert Camus (1913–1960), Algerian-born French journalist, writer. The Plague, part 2, ch. 2, p. 77, trans. by Stuart Gilbert, Penguin Modern Classics (1948).

QUOTATION: It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile—that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.
ATTRIBUTION: Albert Camus (1913–1960), Algerian-born French journalist, writer. The Plague, part 2, ch. 1, p. 60, trans. by Stuart Gilbert, Penguin Modern Classics (1948).

QUOTATION: Everyone Tarrou set eyes on had that vacant gaze, and was visibly suffering from the complete break with all that life had meant to him. And since they could not be thinking of their death all the time, they thought of nothing... “For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything; by meals, by a fly that settles on someone’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.”
ATTRIBUTION: Albert Camus (1913–1960), Algerian-born French journalist, writer. Tarrou, in The Plague, part 4, ch. 5, p. 197, trans. by Stuart Gilbert, Penguin Modern Classics (1948).