"'You will tremble before death.'

Yes, but I shall have left nothing unfulfilled in my mission, which is to live. Don't give way to conformity and to office hours. Don't give up. Never give up--always demand more. But stay lucid, even during office hours. As soon as we are alone in its presence, strive after the nakedness into which the world rejects us. But above all, in order to be, never try to seem."

"The demand for happiness and the patient quest for it. We need not banish our melancholy, but we must destroy our taste for the difficult and fatal things. Be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death."

Mankind's quest for perfection has always turned dark. Man has always existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength. The instinct is to "play God" or at least mediate His providence. Too often, this impulse is not just to improve, but to repress, and even destroy those deemed inferior.

"Yeah, but it's the beginning of the end. And I'm part of that now. I lived so long for nothing, but I get to die for something. And that's really loving. Because that's who I really was after all. That's all that matters."

"Everything is math, Brittle. All of existence is binary. Ones and zeros. On and off. Existing or not. Believing anything beyond that is pretending...there is no good or bad here, Brittle. Ethics are worthless in a meaningless universe."

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles.

"Thomas Builds-the-Fire knew about sickness. He'd caught some disease in the womb that forced him to tell stories. The weight of those stories bowed his legs and bent his spine a bit." - Sherman Alexie

"But all the years have changed more than the shape of our blood and eyes. We wear fear now like a turquoise choker, like a familiar shawl." -Sherman Alexie

"...Witnesses. They were all witnesses and nothing more. For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale...one Indian killing another did not creates special kind of storm. This little kind of hurricane was generic. It didn't even deserve a name." -Sherman Alexie

"And then the guy realizes he can tell me anything precisely - because- he doesn't know me. He realizes that any stranger can be your priest." - Sherman Alexie

"It is true that those princes are without a kingdom. But they have this advantage: they know that all royalties are illusion."

"I had him wrong. He didn't want to be human; he just wanted to have a soul. It's the kind of half measure that will drive you miserable. There was no such thing as the soul. No afterlife. No magic in this world. I've seen that with my own eyes. Mercer had seen the glint of green in the sun and decided to believe it was magic like the rest of them. Maybe he wasn't always like this. Maybe he was already frying out, brainsick enough to lose sight."

"No. Murka was something else. He had the kind of damage even Doc couldn't repair. It's an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical. That was the moment I was having, seeing Murka for the first time through new eyes. He wasn't just draped in the dead anesthetics of America; he WAS America, it's last, final torchbearer

An excellent read, that I finished more than once. Sartre mah be difficult to grasp in some of his others works, such as Being and Nothingness, but some of his major ideas come down to a more relatable level in this particular lecture. It is a must-read for anyone trying to get into the mind of the famous Existentialists.

An excellent philosophical novel on the topic of Camus' absurd man. A bit difficult to read at times, though short, but worth the effort if you're looking for a gateway into Existentialist literature.