system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Source for Camus quote: "It is necessary to fall in love – if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway."

There is no shortage of places on the Internet that will suggest Albert Camus once said, "It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway."

Digging a little deeper, however, none of these sources seem to indicate exactly where he said it. It's enough to make me wonder whether he actually said it at all, and if people have just been misattributing it all over the Internet! 

(I suppose he probably wrote it in French originally, but I would think there would be at least one popular English translation from which it was sourced.)

I hope my Google-fu is not simply failing today. Would anyone here be able to point me in the right direction, or at least suggest an appropriate place to ask? (I may try E-mailing the Quote Investigator.)
gpt
It appears that the quote is from a novel by Camus called *A Happy Death*. From page 114 in the Vintage Books edition (translated by Richard Howard), one of the characters states:

“That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”