Quotes from Joseph Conrad

It was unreal as everything else--as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages.

I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. I

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

Conrad actively sought the reader's collaboration in the production of meaning, telling a friend 'one writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader' (Letters, i, 370).

Let the earth and the sea each have its own.

And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble.

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence — but more generally takes the form of apathy...

I don't know why we behaved like lunatics.

Don Jose Avellanos depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. He accepted it in the benighted way of men, who, though made in God's image, are like stone idols without sense before the smoke of certain burnt offerings.

The making of a fortune cannot be achieved without some roughness. It is a matter of temperament.

I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.

Mr Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous--so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.

His feelings were too much for speech, and suddenly he broke down.

While there's life there is hope, truly; but there is fear, too.

I suppose at that period I did exist on food in the usual way; but the memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant exciting and consuming at the same time.

He had found the secret of keeping for ever on the run the fundamental imbecility of mankind; he had the secret of life, that confounded dying man, and he made himself master of every moment of our existence.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.

La vida és ben rara, un arranjament misteriós de lògica despietada per una finalitat fútil. El màxim que se'n pot esperar és un coneixement de tu mateix, que arriba massa tard, i una collita de retrets inextingibles.

Occupation? Put down, well – tourists. We've been called harder names before now;

There is a taint of death, a flavor of morality in lies,-which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world-what I want to forget.

But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean—except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.