The Fall - Camus

I know of others who have appearance on their side and are no more faithful or sincere.  I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her.  He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people.  Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complication and drama.  Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments.  Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death.  

Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and obviously I bored them too.  No more gambling and no more theater - I was probably in the realm of truth.  But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.  

There are always reasons for murdering a man.  On the contrary, it is impossible to justify his living.  That's why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence only rarely.  

A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally  those who like both lying and the hidden... But what do I care?  Don't lies eventually lead to the truth?  And don't all my stories, truth or false, tend toward the same conclusion?  Don't they all have the same meaning?  So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and of what I am?  Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth.  Truth, like light, blinds.  Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.