Quotes About Joseph Conrad

Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.

And a word carries far-very far-deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.

dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.

No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.

All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much.

Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded

I don't want to excuse myself; but I would like to explain—I would like somebody to understand—somebody—one person at least! You! Why not you?

Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me—still knitting with downcast eyes—and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room.

I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in this world.

My task...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.

and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time.

I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don't know which.

The six stories in this volume are the result of some three or four years of occasional work. The dates of their writing are far apart, their origins are various. None of them are connected directly with personal experiences. In all of them the facts are inherently true, by which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually happened.

if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography—and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation—then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.

Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her - first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next, as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And both were frankly inconceivable to her nature.

And after some more talk we agreed that the wisdom of rats had been grossly overrated, being in fact no greater than that of men.

To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous.

at him I seemed to see again the other one—the father, cast out

He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.

outwards, resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied

Art itself my be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe.

being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognised labour—a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state.

above—the Council in Europe, you know—mean him to be.' He turned to