Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“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 of the very essence of dreams …”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer

“I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a posi-tive relief, being something that had a right to exist—obviously—in the sunshine.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“There was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity,’ and so on, and so on.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together?”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don’t know how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“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.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don’t know; but the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“Can’t say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer

“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/The Secret Sharer