I love quotations. I write down smart and wise ones from my reading or listening. And, as they used to say about learning a new word, use it a few times and it’s yours, like the phrases, “You can say that again,” or, “This sentence is false.” Right after the headlines in the Chronicle, what I read first is the quotation from someone famous at the bottom right of our paper.

I also like trying to kill mistaken quotations, so that the world can be set right. There are many more mistaken or somehow-created false quotations beyond the tongue-in-cheek meme that has gone viral online, of the image of Abraham Lincoln and him being credited with coining the phrase, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”

So, I was immediately struck by the one I saw attributed to Albert Camus a week or so ago, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” Camus is a favorite author of mine, and I was sure he had not “said” that. A quick search confirmed that, but then led to further searching — as William Blake wrote, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” — and so I went on to learn that Camus had, at one point, written that phrase down. But the whole context of it shows why he never “said” it.

Arguably Camus’s darkest, most despairing play is “Le Malentendu,” which was written and produced during the early, least hopeful part of World War 2. In it, an exchange between its two female characters goes like this: Jan says, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf’s a flower,” and Martha replies, “I’ve no patience for this dreary Europe, where autumn has the face of spring and the spring smells of poverty.”

Martha’s perspective was drawn from Camus’s genuine feelings, from growing up in poverty in Algeria and having no patience for the dreary Europe during the seemingly hopeless war. His thoughts were, in fact, the very opposite of what was expressed in that attributed quote.

But let me end with, perhaps, Camus’s most famous quote from later in life — a hard, stoic surprise. Camus loved beaches and swimming, as he grew up near them in a tropical country, so he has, thankfully, been correctly quoted as having said, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

What an excellent quote for us to consider, as winter now comes — literally — and in our own national discontent.

Mark Kohut, of Shepherdstown