A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.

There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.