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Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer QUOTES

Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer QUOTES

1 " 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, valour, rage-who can tell?-but truth-truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder-the man know, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet the truth with his own true stuff-with his own inborn strength. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

2 " The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it much. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

3 " I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

4 " He was little more than a voice. And I heard-him-it-this voice-other voices-all of them were so little more than voices-and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

5 " And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over and inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

6 " And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory-like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

7 " Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

8 " It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

9 " Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

10 " My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

11 " that a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

12 " The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

13 " What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

14 " He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

15 " In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

16 " efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

17 " The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

18 " a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

19 " This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer

20 " I wouldn’t have mentioned the fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time. "

― Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer