Quotes from Joseph Conrad

One lives too long. Happy X-mas.

She lamented about her love of life, that life without grace and charm, and almost without decency, but of an exalted faithfulness of purpose, even into murder.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

I had immense plans,' he irresolutely muttered.

There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company.

time with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind.

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: "'The horror! The horror!

Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force approaching to positive bodily anguish.

There are no such things. All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost.

Stein lifted his hand. "And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?" He shook his head regretfully. "It seems to me that some would have been very fine — if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don't know.

One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

The world is to the young.

It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet if it was not altogether depressing that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on- which was just what you wanted to do.

the danger, if any, i expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion let loose. even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence, but more generally takes the form of apathy

outwards, resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied

No better than a vagabond now' . . . the end of the cigarette smouldered between his fingers . . . 'without a single—single,' he pronounced slowly; 'and yet . . .' He paused; the rain fell with redoubled violence. 'Some day one's bound to come upon some sort of chance to get it all back again. Must!' he whispered, distinctly, glaring at my boots.

No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...

en dehors de l'optique d'espérance éternelle, en dehors de la tromperie des habitudes prises et de l'attente du bonheur toujours rêvé

And she crawled on, do or die, in the serene weather. The sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure. The sea was polished, was blue was pellucid, was sparkling like a precious stone, extending on all sides , all round to the horizon—as if the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colossal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet.

There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It's like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain.

It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.

Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement--but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified.