Albert Camus Quotes

I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'

If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that curiosity might kill cats, but it doesn't kill people.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.

To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

No one wins a war. It is true, there are degrees of loss, but no one wins.

We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.

AIDS has come upon us with cruel abandon. It has forced us to confront and deal with the frailty of our being and the reality of death. It has forced us into a realization that we must cherish every moment of the glorious experience of this thing we call life. We are learning to value our own lives of our loved ones as if any moment may be the last.

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.

There are moments when a rope's end, a pole, the branch of the tree, is life itself, and it is a frightful thing to see a living being lose his hold upon it, and fall like a ripe fruit.

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones.

The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."

My life closed twice before its close

The whole existence of man is a ceaseless duel between the forces of life and death.

But pain seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?

Death is too much to ask of the living.