This was the foreman – a boiler-maker by trade – a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.
They give you wages as they’d fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It’s worse than slavery. You don’t expect a slave that’s bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell your work – what is it but selling your own self? You’ve got so many days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life? Ah! But they throw at you your week’s money and expect you to say, “thank you” before you pick it up.
They had destroyed our sails, consumed more stores than the crew, affably shared our beds and our dangers, and now, when the ship was made seaworthy, concluded to clear out... after some more talk we concluded that the wisdom of rats had been grossly overrated, being in fact no greater than that of men.
No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...
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.
The time was the beginning of the morning, And up the sun was mounting with those stars.
You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him – but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
O Virgins sacrosanct! if ever hunger, Vigils, or cold for you I have endured, The occasion spurs me their reward to claim!
The Coles were very respectable in their way, but they ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which the superior families would visit them.
Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead: and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.
I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies.
The callow birdlet waits for two or three, But to the eyes of those already fledged, In vain the net is spread or shaft is shot.
A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.
I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.
The time therefore that any man doth live, is but a little, and the place where he liveth, is but a very little corner of the earth, and the greatest fame that can remain of a man after his death, even that is but little, and that too, such as it is whilst it is, is by the succession of silly mortal men preserved, who likewise shall shortly die, and even whiles they live know not what in very deed they themselves are: and much less can know one, who long before is dead and gone.
I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples.
When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, has taken care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination.
He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to part from the serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his thoughts.
Long after he had vanished, Nostromo, lifting his eyes up to the sky, muttered, “I am not dead yet.
As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.