Lara

“Without raising his voice Rieux said that he knew nothing about that, but that it was the language of a man weary of the world in which he lived, yet who still had some feeling for his fellow men and was determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Broken words emerged from his mouth, which was covered in a fungoid growth. 'The rats!' he said. Greenish, with waxy lips, leaden eyelids and short, panting breath, tormented by his lymph nodes and pressed against the back of the stretcher bed as though he wanted to close it around him or as if something rising from the depths of the earth were constantly calling him, the concierge was stifling beneath some invisible weight. His wife wept.

'Is there no hope then, doctor?'

'He is dead,' Rieux said.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“[...]there is nothing more normal nowadays than to see people work from morning to evening, then choose to waste the time they have left for living at cards, in a café or in idle chatter.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“[...] and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn't that fearful? Isn't it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you are not helping any one by it, not saving any one from anything! Tell me," he went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end it all!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment