Quotes from book

Heart of Darkness

“The mind of man is capable of anything.”

“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.”

“the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”

“The horror! The horror!”

“Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”