This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh.
It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on – which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don’t know. To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it crawled toward Kurtz – exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow.
I descended the poop.
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her.
The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind.
First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn’t make enough for them both to get drunk on.
The human heart is a vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?
The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I.
The only secret of her life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good.
There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.
Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.
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.
It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Bad world for poor people.
It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.
The diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions.
To get a breath of fresh air.” The expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion of sedentary desk life.
It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.
Such book being there was wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes penciled in the margin and plainly referring to the text.
Our eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cotton-wool.