" He would be expressing himself from the depths of long days of meditation and suffering, the image that he wanted to communicate having been long tempered in the fire of waiting and passion. The other person, meanwhile, imagined a conventional emotion, the suffering that is hawked around the marketplace, a mass-produced melancholy. Whether well-meant or not, the reply would always strike the wrong note and have to be abandoned. Or at least for those to whom silence was unbearable; since others could not find the true language of the heart, they resigned themselves to using the language of the market-place and themselves speaking in a conventional manner, that of the simple account or newspaper report, which is to some extent that of the daily chronicle of events. Here too, the most authentic sufferings were habitually translated into the banal cliches of conversation. It was only at this price that the prisoners of the plague could obtain compassion from their concierges or gain the interest of their audience. "

― Albert Camus