Lily

“A time comes when one can no longer feel the emotion of love. The only thing left is tragedy. Living for someone or for something no longer has any meaning. Nothing seems to keep its meaning except the idea of dying for something.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Today, I feel free about the past and about what I have lost. All I want is this compactness and enclosed space—this lucid and patient fervor. And like the warm bread that one kneads and presses I simply want to hold my life between my hands, like the men who knew how to enclose their life between these flowers and these columns. The same is true of those long nights spent on trains, where one can talk to oneself, prepare oneself for life, and feel marvelously patient in taking up ideas again, stopping them in their fight, and then once more moving forward. To lick one's life like a stick of barley sugar, to form, sharpen, and finally fall in love with it, in the same way as one searches for the word, the image, the definitive sentence, the word or image which marks a close or a conclusion, from which one can start out again and which will color the way we see the world. I can easily stop now, and finally reach the end of a year of unrestrained and over restrained life. My effort now is to carry this presence of myself to myself through to the very end, to maintain it whatever aspect my life takes on—even at the price of the loneliness which I know is so difficult to bear. Not to give way—that is the whole secret. Not to surrender, not to betray. All the violent part of my character helps me in this, carrying me to the point where I am rejoined by my love, and by the furious passion for life which gives meaning to my days.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one's secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown. My deepest joy is to write. To accept the world and to accept pleasure—but only when I am stripped bare of everything. I should not be worthy to love the bare and empty beaches if I could not remain naked in the presence of myself. For the first time I can understand the meaning of the word happiness without any ambiguity. It is a little different from what men normally mean when they say: 'i am happy.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Everything, in me and in people, draws me downward.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942