Joseph Conrad: The Complete Collection

by Joseph Conrad

and in all they said—in their actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.

I didn’t know what he was playing up to—if he was playing up to anything at all—and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last: the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life.

I had pulled the string accidentally, as it were; I did not fully understand the working of the toy.

But what of the distance. Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying.