The Meursault Investigation

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough to know what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?

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

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

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…

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

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?

That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me.

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.