Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.
His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain – why he did not instantly disappear.
Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.
I don’t like work... but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.
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.
In the destructive element immerse.
Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.
Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.
The sight of it made the earth seem unearthly. They were accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous, beautiful, and free.
All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.
And after some talk we agreed that the wisdom of rats had been grossly overrated, being in fact no greater than that of men.
It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth.
He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.