Joseph Conrad Quotes

“A woman’s judgment: intuitive, clever, expressed with felicitous charm—infallible. A judgment that has nothing to do with justice. The critic and the judge seems to think that in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai. And yet it is not so. But the erring magistrate may plead in excuse the misleading nature of the evidence.”
― Joseph Conrad, Joseph Conrad: The Complete Collection

“You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful.” “I have made nothing,” she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing herself. She would explain origins, now. “Your” — she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of the country, or the populations of the earth—”your ancestors were mine, but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases, as we shall contract them, — beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity … of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts — you have forgotten!” She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension — heard that it was an inhabited plane — invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I had seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard the Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension,” I remarked, ironically.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. “What — what!” I cried. “I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“You know how one addresses a young lady who is obviously capable of taking care of herself. That was how I had come across her.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority — superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud of my conversational powers.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“The Inheritors AN EXTRAVAGANT STORY By Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford This science fiction novel was published in London by William Heinemann in 1901 and written in collaboration with Ford Maddox Ford. The plot concerns a cabal of wealthy capitalist investors that call themselves ‘Fourth Dimensionists’ (the ‘inheritors’ of the title) and who plot to take over the world. The novel portrays the ‘Fourth Dimensionists’ as a race apart, their expedient, opportunistic materiality threatening to supplant the enduring ideals of sympathy and mutual interdependence that characterises ‘true’ humanity.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my honour there are moments, too when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“They say that the white man sent right and left at all those faces a proud and unflinching glance. Then with his hand over his lips he fell forward, dead.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“then, while Jim stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son’s friend through the chest.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“People remarked that the ring which he had dropped on his lap fell and rolled against the foot of the white man, and that poor Jim glanced down at the talisman that had opened for him the door of fame, love, and success within the wall of forests fringed with white foam, within the coast that under the western sun looks like the very stronghold of the night.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“I am come in sorrow.” He waited again. “I am come ready and unarmed,” he repeated.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“You promised unasked — remember.” “Enough, poor girl,” he said. “I should not be worth having.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“All at once Jim, who seemed to be lost in quiet thought, turned to him and said, “Time to finish this.” ‘“Tuan?”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“Doramin leaned forward a little more, like one looking for something fallen on the ground. His eyes searched the body from its feet to its head, for the wound maybe. It was in the forehead and small; and there was no word spoken while one of the by-standers, stooping, took off the silver ring from the cold stiff hand. In silence he held it up before Doramin. A murmur of dismay and horror ran through the crowd at the sight of that familiar token. The old nakhoda stared at it, and suddenly let out one great fierce cry, deep from the chest, a roar of pain and fury, as mighty as the bellow of a wounded bull, bringing great fear into men’s hearts, by the magnitude of his anger and his sorrow that could be plainly discerned without words.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“The girl he loved came in and spoke to him, but he made a sign with his hand, and she was awed by the dumb appeal for silence in it. She went out on the verandah and sat on the threshold, as if to guard him with her body from dangers outside.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“But a story is told of a white long-boat picked up a month later in the Indian Ocean by a cargo steamer. Two parched, yellow, glassy-eyed, whispering skeletons in her recognised the authority of a third, who declared that his name was Brown. His schooner, he reported, bound south with a cargo of Java sugar, had sprung a bad leak and sank under his feet. He and his companions were the survivors of a crew of six. The two died on board the steamer which rescued them. Brown lived to be seen by me, and I can testify that he had played his part to the last.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution — a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“At the sound of the first shots Dain Waris, reclining on the couch, jumped up and ran out upon the open shore, just in time to receive a bullet in his forehead at the second discharge. Tamb’ Itam saw him fling his arms wide open before he fell.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“I’ll give you a chance to get even with them before we’re done, you dismal cripples, you,” he said to his gang. “Mind you don’t throw it away — you hounds.” Low growls answered that speech.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“Throw me out, would you? But I would know where I was,” mumbled Cornelius surlily. “I’ve lived many years here.” “Not long enough to see through a fog like this,” Brown said, lolling back with his arm swinging to and fro on the useless tiller. “Yes. Long enough for that,” snarled Cornelius. “That’s very useful,” commented Brown. “Am I to believe you could find that backway you spoke of blindfold, like this?” Cornelius grunted. “Are you too tired to row?” he asked after a silence. “No, by God!” shouted Brown suddenly. “Out with your oars there.” There was a great knocking in the fog, which after a while settled into a regular grind of invisible sweeps against invisible thole-pins. Otherwise nothing was changed, and but for the slight splash of a dipped blade it was like rowing a balloon car in a cloud, said Brown.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“You get the clear road. Start as soon as your boat floats on the morning tide. Let your men be careful. The bushes on both sides of the creek and the stockade at the mouth are full of well-armed men. You would have no chance, but I don’t believe you want bloodshed.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“Are they very bad?” she asked, leaning over his chair. “Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others,” he said after some hesitation.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“sort of virile sincerity in accepting the morality and the consequences of his acts. But Jim did not know the almost inconceivable egotism of the man which made him, when resisted and foiled in his will, mad with the indignant and revengeful rage of a thwarted autocrat.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“she served him with her own hands, taking the plates and dishes (of the dinner-service presented him by Stein) from Tamb’ Itam.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“he said that something might happen for which he would never forgive himself. “I am responsible for every life in the land,” he said.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“sort of virile sincerity in accepting the morality and the consequences of his acts.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“the testimony to that faithfulness which made him in his own eyes the equal of the impeccable men who never fall out of the ranks. Stein’s words, “Romantic! — Romantic!” seem to ring over those distances that will never give him up now to a world indifferent to his failings and his virtues, and to that ardent and clinging affection that refuses him the dole of tears in the bewilderment of a great grief and of eternal separation. From the moment the sheer truthfulness of his last three years of life carries the day against the ignorance, the fear, and the anger of men, he appears no longer to me as I saw him last — a white speck catching all the dim light left upon a sombre coast and the darkened sea — but greater and more pitiful in the loneliness of his soul, that remains even for her who loved him best a cruel and insoluble mystery.”
― Joseph Conrad, Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad