What's natural is the microbe. All the rest-heath, integrity, purity (if you like)-is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.

I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me.

Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.

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

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.

To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.