The Plague

‘But I feel sure it’s not contagious,’ he hastened to assure me. “I told him it was all the same to me. “ ‘Ah, I understand, sir. You’re like me, you’re a fatalist.’ “I had said nothing of the kind and, what’s more, am not a fatalist.

It is only fair to add that Oran is grafted on to a unique landscape, in the center of a bare plateau, ringed with luminous hills and above a perfectly shaped bay. All we may regret is the town’s being so disposed that it turns its back on the bay, with the result that it’s impossible to see the sea, you always have to go to look for it.

we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away,

half-obliterated words: “flowery avenues.”

I can’t say I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?”

the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it’s possible to be at once so dull and happy.

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn’t waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach.

“The important thing,” Castel replied, “isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.”