Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one’s enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one’s friends.
The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage – who can tell? – but truth – truth stripped of its cloak of time.
They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
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”.
I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.
He hated all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away.
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.
The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.
Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.
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.
She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.
Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
Going home must be like going to render an account.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?