Lara

“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

“Tarrou had appeared to reach the almost unattainable peace which he spoke, but he found it only in death, at a moment when it could be of no use to him.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“It could only be the record of what had to be done and what, no doubt, would have to be done again, against the terror and its indefatigable weapons, despite their own personal hardships, by all men who, not being saints but refusing to give way to pestilence, do their best to be doctors.”
― 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