Wherefore … I think it would be excellently well done that we depart this place … and betake ourselves quietly to other places in our thought … and there take such diversion as we may …
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us … Once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life.
Albert Camus, The Plague
Captivity is above all a smell, an incommunicable odor of humiliation … For imprisonment is a form of erosion. The captive devours himself trying to understand his abandonment.
Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Black Room of Longwood