Joseph Conrad Heart Of Darkness Quotes & Sayings

When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in. — Kristin Armstrong

It's good for a writer to come from journalism because it gives you the tools. A journalist knows that he or she can lose the reader in six lines, so try to keep the attention of the reader. Also, you learn to research, and to conduct an interview - to extract from the person whatever you need from that person. — Isabel Allende

The vision seemed to enter the house with me - the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart - the heart of a conquering darkness. — Joseph Conrad

I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; — Marcel Proust

...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. — Joseph Conrad

Nearly every English speaker interested in Africa read Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (1878), and nearly everyone who read Stanley came away viewing African people as savages, including novelist Joseph Conrad, who authored the classic Heart of Darkness in 1899. The White character's journey up the Congo River "was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world" - not back in chronological time, but back in evolutionary time.2 — Ibram X. Kendi

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men. — Joseph Conrad

Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality? — Chuck Palahniuk

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze. — Salvatore Quasimodo

Death stared at her. He'd never before experienced an unsatisfied customer. He was at a loss. Finally he gave up. BEGONE, YOU BLACK AND MIDNIGHT HAG, he said. The — Terry Pratchett

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. — Joseph Conrad

You know, I've read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' about fifteen times. — James Balog

Light came out of this river since - you say Knights? Yes, but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! — Joseph Conrad

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 council with this great solitude - and the whisper has proved irresistibly fascinating. — Joseph Conrad

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways.. Yet it is never viewed with indifference; beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive — Roger Scruton

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness — Joseph Conrad

Quince ... why didn't you ever tell her? This girl you love. Why didn't you tell her how you feel?" ... "Because"- his voice is heavy with a kind of resigned sadness-"She doesn't want to know."
Lily & Quince pg.223 — Tera Lynn Childs

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head - though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too - but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him - himself - his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground of floated in the air. — Joseph Conrad

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. — Joseph Conrad

I had immense plans,' he irresolutely muttered. — Joseph Conrad