Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim Quotes

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.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

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?

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.

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.

It was a dark story.

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...