For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

We traced this line to Albert Camus's 1956 novel *The Fall*, spoken by the confessional narrator Jean-Baptiste Clamence, and the surrounding context confirms it: the sentence continues "Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style," a passage repeatedly quoted verbatim in independent works. One of our earliest research passes proposed *The First Man* instead, but the direct textual evidence points firmly to *The Fall* — Norman Geisler's *The Big Book of Christian Apologetics* cites it precisely as "(Camus, The Fall, 133)," and multiple other books (McLelland's *Prometheus Rebound*, Zornberg's *The Hidden Order of Intimacy*, Novak's *Belief and Unbelief*) reproduce the full passage with its distinctive follow-on lines. A full-text check of several Camus editions returned no verbatim match, but that is inconclusive given translation variance and coverage gaps, and it does not outweigh the specific page citation and the consistent contextual reproduction across serious secondary works. There is no credible competing author and no evidence the line predates Camus. On the strength of an identifiable primary work with a cited page and corroborating context, we are marking this quotation as verified.