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“The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter to Edward Garnett written in March 1899, published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 2, p. 177

“Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the [Nore] lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond… [The inward-bound ships] all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

The Nore to Hope Point
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

“History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 8

“The sea — this truth must be confessed — has no generosity. No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness — has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 36

“Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.”

Joseph Conrad

Letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review (August 1901), as quoted in Joseph Conrad: A Life (2007) by Zdzisław Najder, translated by Halina Najder, p. 315

“Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.”

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale (1915), part II, Ch. 3

“A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

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

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”

Joseph Conrad

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

“To the destruction of what is.”

Joseph Conrad book The Secret Agent

Toast by the Professor, Ch. 13
The Secret Agent (1907)

“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 27

“When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

Joseph Conrad

An Outcast of the Islands http://www.gutenberg.org/files/638/638-h/638-h.htm (1896), first lines,

“The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part First: The Silver of the Mine, Ch. 6
Nostromo (1904)

“I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam — a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because… their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

On Amsterdam, Ch. 14
The Mirror of the Sea (1906)

“I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.”

Joseph Conrad book Chance

Chance (1913), part I, Ch. 6

“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.”

Joseph Conrad

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

“Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Tilbury / Gravesend to London Bridge
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

“The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.”

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale (1915), part I, Ch. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=jhVObcSHoQgC&q=%22The+world+of+finance+is+a+mysterious+world+in+which+incredible+as+the+fact+may+appear+evaporation+precedes+liquidation%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage

“As to honour — you know — it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.”

Joseph Conrad book Chance

Chance (1913), Part I, Ch. 2

“The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.”

Joseph Conrad book Victory

Victory: An Island Tale, part II, Ch. 5

“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

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