Quotes from Joseph Conrad

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon

And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth.

They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it much.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go

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.

His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion.

Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please This also became Conrad's epitaph.

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.