I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.