Doctor Bernard Rieux Quotes

“No . . . You can’t understand. You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions.”

“Then came the second phase of conflict, tears and pleadings—abstraction, in a word. In those fever-hot, nerve-ridden sickrooms crazy scenes took place.”

“We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“A feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and-together with fear-the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead.”

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.”

“You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto so tranquil, and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature shoot up and the blood seething like wildfire in his veins.”

“What we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

“Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile.”

“At first the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But, now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration.”

“I’ve been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood. But people don’t love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me – only I couldn’t.”

“They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”