Meursault Quotes

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Just read this fabulous screenplay. A remake of Camus's The Stranger with Meursault as a bi break-dancing punk rocker. Randy showed it to me. I loved it. Randy thinks "basically unfilmable" and that filming an orange rolling around a parking lot for three hours would draw a bigger audience.

You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you;

As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use.

People always have exaggerated ideas about unfamiliar things'. - Meursault

he doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened.

De temps en temps j'avais envie d'interrompre tout le monde et de dire: 'Mais tout de même, qui est l'accusé? C'est important d'être accusé. Et j'ai quelque chose à dire.' Mais réflexion faite, je n'avais rien à dire.

As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip.

Meursault.

While he can interact with others who have no idea that anything is wrong, Ron lives without spontaneity, going through the motions, doing what he thinks people expect him to do, glad that he is able to at least appear normal throughout the day and maintain a job. He studied drama briefly while in college, and remains enamored of Shakespeare and literature, but an emerging self-consciousness eventually robbed him of his ability to act. Now he feels as if all of his life is an act—just an attempt to maintain the status quo. Recalling literature he once loved, he sometimes pictures himself as Camus’s Meursault, in The Stranger: an emotionless character who plods through life in a meaningless universe with apathy and indifference. He’s tired of living this way but terrified of death.

Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.

I didn't want to kill time. I don't like that expression. I like to look at time, follow it with my eyes, take what I can.

We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.

As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.

Ranzanın bir ucuna Meursault'yu oturttum, onun yanına, aralarında Fransızca konuşsunlar diye Jean Valjean'ı yerleştirdim. Biraz ötede Katyuşa ile Raskolnikov fıfıl fısıl Rusça konuşuyorlardı, herhalde Nehludov'un ziyaretinden söz ediyorlardı. Keşanlı Ali duvarın dibine ilişmişti, Dr. B ise zihninden satranç oynuyordu.

...the devil's hour, two o'clock on a summer afternoon--the siesta hour.

Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.

Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes.

But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes.

An animated conversation was in progress and the woman behind the counter started airing her views about a murder case that had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach.

So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth.

But no, he didn’t name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.

That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.

Good God, how can you kill someone and then take even his own death away from him?

The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.

The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation.

Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness.

To be the child of a place that never gave you birth …

Everybody wants a village wife and a big-city whore.

What lunacy. Such gratuitous deaths. Who could take life seriously afterward? Everything in my life seems gratuitous.

As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity.

Your Meursault doesn’t describe a world in his book, he describes the end of a world. A world where property is useless, marriage practically unnecessary, and weddings halfhearted, where it’s as though people are already sitting on their luggage, empty, superficial, holding on to their sick and fetid dogs, incapable of forming more than two sentences or pronouncing four words in a row. Robots!

Why is it forbidden down here and promised up there? Drunken driving. Maybe God doesn’t want humanity to drink while it’s driving the universe to its place, holding on to the steering wheel of heaven

There are two people in the waiting room. One is an extremely thin old man, a retired teacher of French who still gives tuition by correspondence, and who whilst waiting his turn is correcting a pile of scripts with a pencil sharpened to a fine point. On the script he is about to examine, the essay title can be read: In Hell, Raskolnikov meets Meursault (“The Outsider”). Imagine a dialogue between them using material from both novels.

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren’t they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I’m not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim.

At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind Hesse’s recognition that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as man; ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise.’ The primitive religious notion of man’s relation to his creator collapses under the Outsider’s criticism. The Outsider’s wretchedness lies in his inability to find a new faith; he tends to regard his condition of unbelief as the result of a Fall. ^ This is the essential Van Gogh; not a painter, but an Outsider, for whom life is an acute and painful question that demands solution before he begins living. His earliest experiences teach him that life is an eternal Pro and Contra. His sensitivity makes him unusually aware of the Contra, of his own misery and the world’s. All his faculties are exerted in a search for the Pro, for instinctive, absolute Yea-saying. Like all artists, he has moments when he seems to be in complete accord with the universe and himself, when, like Meursault, he feels that the universe and himself are of the same nature; then all life seems purposive, and his own miseries purposive. The rest of the time is a struggle to regain that insight. If there is an order in the universe, if he can sometimes perceive that order and feel himself completely in accord with it, then it must be seeable, touchable, so that it could be regained by some discipline. Art is only one form of such a discipline.

don’t fast, I will never go on any pilgrimage, and I drink wine — and what’s more, the air that makes it better. To cry out that I’m free, and that God is a question, not an answer, and that I want to meet him alone, at my death as at my birth.

I’m so old that I often tell myself, on nights when multitudes of stars are sparkling in the sky, there must necessarily be something to be discovered from living so long. Living, what an effort! At the end, there must necessarily be, there has to be, some sort of essential revelation. It shocks me, this disproportion between my insignificance and the vastness of the cosmos. I often think there must be something all the same, something in the middle between my triviality and the universe!

That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly.

Thousands of times the French saw, over the course of those four years, in shop windows, bottles of Saint-Emilion or of Meursault arranged in neat pyramids. They’d approach the window, enticed, only to read on a placard: artificial display. So it was with Paris: it was nothing more than an artificial display. Everything was hollow and empty: the Louvre without paintings, the Chamber without deputies, the Senate without senators, the Lycée Montaigne without students. The artificial existence that the Germans maintained, the theatrical events, the races, the miserable and lugubrious festivals held only in order to show the universe that France was saved because Paris still lived: all were the strange consequence of centralization.

So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever.

I find love inexplicable. The sight of a couple always surprises me, their inevitable slow rhythm, their insistent groping, their indistinguishable food, their way of taking hold of each other with hands and eyes at the same time, their way of blurring at the edges. I can’t understand why one hand has to clasp another and never let it go in order to give someone else’s heart a face. How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate? I’ve read many books, and I’ve concluded that love’s an accommodation, certainly not a mystery. It seems to me that the feelings love elicits in other people are, well, pretty much the same as the ones death elicits in me: the sensation that every life is precarious and absolute, the rapid heartbeat, the distress before an unresponsive body. Death — when I received it, when I gave it — is for me the only mystery. All the rest is nothing but rituals, habits, and dubious bonding. To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels. Have you seen what becomes of people when they split up? They’re scratches on a closed door.

How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate?

But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. That’s denial of a shockingly violent kind, don’t you think? As soon as the shot is fired, the murderer turns around, heading for a mystery he considers worthier of interest than the Arab’s life.

I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man’s name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him “Two P.M.,” like that other writer who called his black man “Friday.

- Mano nuomone, „Meursault“ sulaukia per menko dėme­sio! - sušukau entuziastingai. - „Meursault“ yra sintezė, tarsi daug vynų viename, ar ne?

Büyüklüğün, çektiğin acı nice örnek hikâyede yüceltiliyor. Nice Robinson'lar, Roquentin'ler, Meursault'lar, Leverkühnler. İyi şeyler, güzel görüntüler, yalanlar: Doğru değil bu. Hiçbir şey öğrenmedin, tanıklık edemezsin. Doğru değil bu, inanma onlara, kurbanlara, kahramanlara, serüvencilere inanma!

Je me suis toujours demandé : pourquoi ce rapport compliqué avec le vin ? Pourquoi diabolise-t-on ce breuvage quand il est censé couler à profusion au paradis ? Pourquoi est-il interdit ici-bas, et promis là-haut ? Conduite en état d’ivresse. Peut-être Dieu ne veut-il pas que l’humanité boive pendant qu’elle conduit l’univers à sa place et tient le volant des cieux…

La vie dans les campagnes était dure, révélant ce que les villes cachaient, à savoir que ce pays crevait de faim.

I think I’d just like justice to be done. That may seem ridiculous at my age … But I swear it’s true. I don’t mean the justice of the courts, I mean the justice that comes when the scales are balanced

Mama’s still alive today.

And afterward, therefore, everybody bent over backward to prove there was no murder, just sunstroke.

you get offered the best liquors after your death, not before.

Now there were a few skirt-wearing, firm-breasted Algerian women who shuttled between our world and the world of the roumis, down in the French neighborhoods. We brats used to call them whores and stone them with our eyes. They were fascinating targets, because they could promise the pleasures of

That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me.

Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn't feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we're six and it's nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.

I’ll tell you this up front: The other dead man, the murder victim, was my brother. There’s nothing left of him. There’s only me, left to speak in his place, sitting in this bar, waiting for condolences no one’s ever going to offer.

M’ma avait l’art de rendre vivants les fantômes et, inversement, d’anéantir ses proches,

Her type of woman has disappeared in this country today: free, brash, disobedient, aware of their body as a gift, not as a sin or a shame. The only time I saw a cold shadow come over her was when she told me about her domineering, polygamous father, whose lecherous eyes stirred up doubt and panic in her. Books delivered her from her family and offered her a pretext for getting away from Constantine; as soon as she could, she’d enrolled in the University of Algiers.

She lied not from a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and mitigate the absurdity that struck her world and mine.

In my head, every voice corresponds with a woman, a time of life, a concern, a mood, or even the kind of wash that's going to be hung out that day.

Courant tête baissée dans un néant étincelant, l'Ermite a la certitude d'être déjà mort.

With my whole body and all my hands, I'm clinging to this life, which I alone shall lose and which I'm the sole witness to.

In the space of two mere weeks, I have come to know the meaning of life. I won’t share it with you, because we all have to find our own meaning. Camus was right, though. Sometimes, I feel just like Meursault.

Philosophers like Heidegger have even argued that our scientific understanding of the world, which is essentially aimed at domination and control, has been bought at the price of a damaged relationship between humanity and nature: in Wordsworth’s phrase, “we murder to dissect.” Another ancient argument, and one that remains relevant today, is that the pleasures of appreciating and studying nature are readily available to nearly everyone in almost any circumstances. This consideration also grounds a further subtle argument advanced by Epicurus: studying nature makes us happier because it leads us away from envy, resentment, and dissatisfaction over what we lack compared to others. It does so because it leads us to take pride “in the good things of our own minds rather than in our circumstances.”56 The idea here is that readily available pleasures have a beneficial equalizing function. Ocean-front mansions may be exclusive to the rich, but most facets of nature—trees, wildflowers, birds, insects, beaches, rivers, mountains, stars—are open to all. In an often-cited passage in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault reflects, while in prison, that he could be content to spend his time simply looking up through a hollow tree trunk at the clouds and birds passing overhead. His thought captures not just the easy and equal accessibility of the pleasures nature offers but also their inexhaustibility.

She doesn’t say anything now, but there are many tales she could tell.

I peddle offstage silence, trying to sell my story while the theater empties out.

I’m sure you’re like everyone else, you’ve read the tale as told by the man who wrote it.

He’s writing about a gunshot, and he makes it sound like poetry!

I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man’s name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him “Two P.M.,” like that other writer who called his black man “Friday.” An hour of the day instead of a day of the week. Two in the afternoon, that’s good. Zujj in Algerian Arabic, two, the pair, him and me, the unlikeliest twins, somehow, for those who know the story of the story. A brief Arab, technically ephemeral, who lived for two hours and has died incessantly for seventy years, long after his funeral. It’s like my brother Zujj has been kept under glass. And even though he was a murder victim, he’s always given some vague designation, complete with reference to the two hands of a clock, over and over again, so that he replays his own death, killed by a bullet fired by a Frenchman who just didn’t know what to do with his day and with the rest of the world, which he carried on his back.

After his mother dies, this man, this murderer, finds himself without a country and falls into idleness and absurdity.

I think I can guess why people write true stories. Not to make themselves famous but to make themselves more invisible, and all the while clamoring for a piece of the world’s true core.

Drink up and look out the window — you’d think this country was an aquarium.

You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you; and from then on, it falls into the habit of grasping things in your place, it takes over your mouth like a lover’s voracious kiss. I knew someone who learned to write in French because one day his illiterate father received a telegram no one could decipher.

I believe he already loved us then the way the dead do, with a look in his eyes that came from the hereafter and with no useless words.

I remember the road to Hadjout, lined with fields whose crops weren’t destined for us, and the naked sun, and the other travelers on the dusty bus. The oil fumes nauseated me, but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine, like a kind of father that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an immense labyrinth made up of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, or the place where something pure and ancient was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer.

It’s as though people have a grudge against the city and they’ve come here to trash it and plunder it, like a kind of foreign country. People treat the city like an old harlot, they insult it, they abuse it, they fling garbage in its face, they never stop comparing it to the pure, wholesome little town it used to be in the old days, but they can’t leave it, because it’s the only possible escape to the sea and the farthest you can get from the desert.

The last day of a man’s life doesn’t exist. Outside of storybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but soap bubbles bursting. That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: Nobody’s granted a final day, just an accidental interruption in his life.

These days, my mother’s so old she looks like her own mother, or maybe her great-grandmother, or even her great-great-grandmother. Once we reach a certain age, time gives us the features of all our ancestors, combined in the soft jumble of reincarnations. And maybe, in the end, that’s what the next world is, an endless corridor where all your ancestors are lined up, one after another. They turn toward the living descendant and simply wait, without words, without movements, their patient eyes fixed on a date.

Rural life was hard, it revealed what the cities kept hidden, namely that the country was starving to death.

Did I love her? Of course. Among us, the mother makes up half the world.

At this hour, it seems that people are entitled to something more than their routine.

And let’s not forget the cigarette. His eternal cigarette, connecting him to heaven by the fine coil of smoke twisting and rising above him.

To prove my existence, I had to disappoint her. It was like fate. That tie bound us together, deeper than death.

Women have an intuition about what’s unfinished and avoid men who cling to their youthful doubts too long.

Feelings grow old slowly, not as fast as skin. Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn’t feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we’re six and it’s nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.

There’s always another, my friend. In love, in friendship, or even on a train, there he is, the other, sitting across from you and staring at you, or turning his back to you and deepening the perspectives of your solitude.

When you kill someone, there’s a part of you that immediately starts devising an explanation, making up an alibi, putting together a version of the facts that washes your hands clean, even though they still smell of gunpowder and sweat.

Something deep inside me sat down, curled up into a ball, took its head in its hands, and sighed so profoundly that I was touched and tears sprang to my eyes.

Mama began to grow old naturally, she was no longer preserved by spite, wrinkles folded her face into a thousand pages, and her own ancestors at last seemed calm and capable of approaching her to open the lengthy debate that leads to the end.

There was a lot of killing going on back then, during the first days of Independence. It was a strange period, when you could kill without worrying about it

Lying on my back in the courtyard, I made an even denser night for myself by closing my eyes. When I opened them, I remember seeing yet more stars in the sky, and I knew I was trapped in a bigger dream, a more gigantic denial, that of another being who always kept his eyes closed and didn’t want to see anything, like me.

It’s the end of the day, the stars are coming out one by one, and the night has already given the sky a positively exhilarating depth. I love this regular denouement; the night calls the earth back to the sky and gives it a portion of infinity almost equal to its own. I killed at night, and ever since I’ve had night’s immensity for an accomplice.

after I’d killed a man, it wasn’t my innocence I missed the most, it was the border that had existed until then between my life and crime. That’s a line that’s hard to redraw later. The Other is a unit of measurement you lose when you kill.

The unpunished murderer develops a certain inclination to laziness. But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes. After what I did, the body of every woman I met quickly lost its sensuality, its possibility of giving me an illusion of the absolute. Every surge of desire was accompanied by the knowledge that life reposes on nothing solid. I could suppress it so easily that I couldn’t adore it — I would have been deceiving myself. I’d chilled all human bodies by killing only one. Indeed, my dear friend, the only verse in the Koran that resonates with me is this: “If you kill a single person, it is as if you have killed the whole of mankind.

Say, this morning I read a fascinating article in an old, out-of-date newspaper. It told the story of a certain Sadhu Amar Bharati. I’m sure you’ve never heard of this gentleman. He’s an Indian who claims to have kept his right hand raised toward the sky for thirty-eight years. As a result, his arm’s nothing more than a bone covered with skin. It will remain fixed in its position until he dies. Maybe that’s how it goes for all of us, basically. For some, it’s both arms, embracing the void left behind by a beloved body; for others, it’s a hand holding back a child already grown, or a leg raised above a threshold never crossed, or teeth clenched on a word never uttered, et cetera.

Committing a real murder gives one some new, clear-cut certitudes. Read what your hero wrote about his stay in a prison cell. I often reread that passage myself, it’s the most interesting part of his whole hodgepodge of sun and salt. When your hero’s in his cell, that’s when he’s best at asking the big questions.

Someone told me recently that the best-selling books in this country are cookbooks. Well, I know why. While Mama and I were waking up from our drama, staggering but maybe, finally, appeased, the rest of the country was devouring everything, gobbling up the land and the rest of the sky and the houses and the power poles and the species that couldn’t defend themselves. As I see it, my countrymen don’t eat exclusively with their hands but with everything else too: with their eyes, feet, tongue, and skin. Everything gets devoured: bread, sweets of all sorts, meats from afar, fowl, all kinds of herbs. But in the end, apparently, that’s no longer sufficient. The way I see it, these people need something bigger as a counterweight to the abyss. My mother used to call that “the endless serpent,” and I think it’ll lead us all to premature death, or to someplace on the edges of the earth where we can topple over into the void.

I think that’s the grand style, when all is said and done: to speak with the austere precision the last moments of your life impose on you.

Unseen trees tried to walk, flailing about with their big branches in the effort to free their black, fragrant trunks. My ear was glued to the ground of their struggle.