from Sophie's World, author Jostein Gaarder:

• You can't experience being alive without realizing that you have to die. But it's just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.
• But if space had come from semething else, then that something else must also have come from something. At some point, something must have come from nothing. But was that possible? Wasn't that just as impossible as the idea that the world had always existed?
• Had my eyes lacked any of the four substances, I would not have seen all nature.
• He was later accused of atheism and was ultimately forced to leave the city.
• A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosour.
• Everything obeys the inevitable laws of necessity.
• He who knows what is right will do right.
• Shyness; for example, about being naked. But was it really natural to be embarrassed about that? If something was natural, she supposed, it was the same for everybody. In many parts of the world it was completely natural to be naked. So it must be society that decides what you can and can't do.
• Without a society around us, we are not real people.
• Conscience is people's ability to respond to right and wrong. Right and wrong is something mainly determined by the environment the individual grows up in.
• What a lot of things I don't need!
• Man must learn to accept his destiny. Nothing happens accidentally.
• As long as we exist, death is not here.
• Just as certain world religions say that people who do not believein a personal god outside themselves is are atheists, we say that a person who does not believe in himself is an atheist.
• Love thy neighbor as thyself because you are your neighbor.

The afterfward from The Outsider, by Albert Camus:

    A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider in a sentence which I realize is extremely paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death. I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for that reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one which conforms more closely to his author’s inten-tions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn’t play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appear-ances, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him.

    So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absol-ute and for truth. This truth is as yet a negative one, a truth born of living and feeling, but without which no triumph over the self or over the world will ever be possible.

    So one wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. I also once said, and again paradoxically, that I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be under-stood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat ironic affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created.

                                                                                                                        Albert Camus,
                                                                                                                        8 january 1995
 
 
 
 

Quote from the same book:
 

    I might seem to be empty-handed. But I was sure of myself, sure of everything, surer than he was, sure of my life and sure of the death that was coming to me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least it was a truth which I had holdof just as it had hold of me. I'd been right, I was still right, I was always right. I'd lived in a certain way and I could just as well have lived in a different way. I'd done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done one thing whereas I had done another. So what? It was as if I'd been waiting all along for this very moment and for the early dawn when I'd be justified. Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew very well why. He too knew why. From the depths of my future, throughout the whole of this absurd life I'd been leading, I'd felt a vague breath dirifting towards me across all the years that were still to come, and on its way his breath had evend out everything that was then being proposed to me in the equally unreal years I was living through. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me, what did his God or the lives people chose or the destinies they selected matter to me, when one and the same destiny was to select me and thousands of millions of other privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Didn't he understand? Everyone was privileged.