Daniela ☆’s Reviews > The Stranger > Status Update

“And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”

“What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; why did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged.”

“Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying.”

“What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet.”

“Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.”

“But I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.”

“And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day… as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.”

“It was then I felt a stirring go through the room and for the first time I realized that I was guilty.”

“No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine what nights in prison are like.”

“I would have waited for birds do fly by or clouds to mingle, just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as, in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms.”

“I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.”