The Plague Freedom and Confinement Quotes

Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the cross currents of revolt and fear set up by these. (3.1.1)

That evening hour which for believers is the time to look into their conscience is the hardest of all hours on the prisoner or exile who has nothing to look into but the void. For a moment it held them in suspense; then they sank back into their lethargy, the prison door had closed on them once again. (3.1.29)

"When I suggested to him," Tarrou continues, "that the surest way of not being cut of from others was having a clean conscience, he frowned. ‘If that is so, everyone’s always cut off from everyone else.’ And a moment later he added: ‘Say what you like, Tarrou, but let me tell you this: the one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of plague.’" (4.1.16)

Rieux agreed, merely adding that the long separation was beginning to tell on him, and, what was more, he might have helped his wife to make a good recovery; whereas, as things were, she must be feeling terribly lonely. (4.1.5)

At the end of the plague, with its misery and privations, these men and women had come to wear the aspect of the part they had been playing for so long, the part of emigrants whose faces first, and now their clothes, told of the long banishment from a distant homeland. Once plague had shut the gates of the town, they had settled down to a life of separation, debarred from the living warmth that gives forgetfulness of all. (5.4.11)

All the same, following the dictates of his heart, he has deliberately taken the victims’ side and tried to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common—love, exile, and suffering. (5.5.2)