Joseph Conrad: Trending quotes

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Joseph Conrad: 254 quotes46 likes

“We couldn't understand because we were too far… and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign… and no memories.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out".”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“We can never cease to be ourselves.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Source: The Secret Agent

“Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.”

Joseph Conrad

“There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.”

Joseph Conrad

“In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility”

Joseph Conrad

“Never test another man by your own weakness.”

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Source: Lord Jim

“I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Joseph Conrad

Source: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

“I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)

“It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Source: Lord Jim

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book The Rover

Source: The Rover

“There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness