The Plague
Albert Camus, Professor Tony Judt, Tony Judt, and Robin Buss
Of course, there is nothing more normal nowadays than to see people work from morning to evening, then choose to waste the time they have left for living at cards, in a café or in idle chatter. But there are towns and countries where people do occasionally have an inkling of something else. (Location 55)
Men and women either consume each other rapidly in what is called the act of love, or else enter into a long-lasting, shared routine. Often there is no middle between these two extremes. (Location 59)
In this respect, the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves. (Location 472)
Note: People alwaays shy from what is not directly experienced
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has fought a war, one hardly knows any more what a dead person is. And if a dead man has no significance unless one has seen him dead, a hundred million bodies spread through history are just a mist drifting through the imagination. (Location 483)
Thus they endured that profound misery of all prisoners and all exiles, which is to live with a memory that is of no use to them. (Location 884)
Tags: orange
through the story of their love and to examine its imperfections. In normal times we are all aware, consciously or not, that there is no love which cannot to be surpassed, yet we accept with a greater or lesser degree of equanimity that ours shall remain merely average. (Location 906)
Tags: orange
A working man, poverty, a narrowing of possibilities, the silent evenings around the table: there is no place for passion in such a universe. (Location 1000)
‘No,’ Rambert said bitterly. ‘You cannot understand. You are talking the language of reason, you are thinking in abstract terms.’ (Location 1060)