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The Meursault Investigation

Kamel Daoud

Top 10 Best Quotes

“As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer got famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language. The murderer's words and expressions are my unclaimed goods. Besides, the country's littered with words that don't belong to anyone anymore.”

“I didn't want to kill time. I don't like that expression. I like to look at time, follow it with my eyes, take what I can.”

“Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.”

“I’m so old that I often tell myself, on nights when multitudes of stars are sparkling in the sky, there must necessarily be something to be discovered from living so long. Living, what an effort! At the end, there must necessarily be, there has to be, some sort of essential revelation. It shocks me, this disproportion between my insignificance and the vastness of the cosmos. I often think there must be something all the same, something in the middle between my triviality and the universe!”

“Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes.”

“...the devil's hour, two o'clock on a summer afternoon--the siesta hour.”

“Your Meursault doesn’t describe a world in his book, he describes the end of a world. A world where property is useless, marriage practically unnecessary, and weddings halfhearted, where it’s as though people are already sitting on their luggage, empty, superficial, holding on to their sick and fetid dogs, incapable of forming more than two sentences or pronouncing four words in a row. Robots!”

“What lunacy. Such gratuitous deaths. Who could take life seriously afterward? Everything in my life seems gratuitous.”

“To be the child of a place that never gave you birth …”

“Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness.”

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Book Keywords:

otherness, language, siesta, absurdity, love, independence, orientalism, devil-s-hour, alienation, attraction, human-existence, mother, death, displacement, unclaimed-goods, meaninglessness-of-life, other

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