Joseph Conrad
133 quotes
Biography
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and – though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties – he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.
"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men."
"History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird."
"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose."
"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."
"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
"The mind of man is capable of anything."
"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."
"The question is not how to get cured, but how to live."
"Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings."
"Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear"
"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams..."
"Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker."
"It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge."
"A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!"
"By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick."
"I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones."
"How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?"
"Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism. ... Disestablishment, Land Reform, Universival Brotherhood are but like milestones on the road to ruin."
"Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished."
"When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect."
"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it."
"The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep."
"She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head."
"One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become."
"Running all over the sea trying to get behind the weather."