Nostromo Quotes

“I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, a Tale of the Seaboard

“She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“The priests talk of consecrated ground! Bah! All the earth made by God is holy; but the sea, which knows nothing of kings and priests and tyrants, is the holiest of all.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“...all this life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“It had come into her mind that for life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“. . . what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough—it is said—to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in the search.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction—that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, a Tale of the Seaboard

“That man seems to have a particular talent for being on the spot whenever there is something picturesque to be done.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“A man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tomé mine. Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw. Then it became forgotten.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale Of The Seaboard

“Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

“It was another of Nostromo's triumphs, the greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

“To overcome your adversary was the great affair of life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

“Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That's how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That's your ray of hope.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“An immense desolation, the dread of her own continued life, descended upon the first lady of Sulaco. With a prophetic vision she saw herself
surviving alone the degradation of her young ideal of life, of love, of work”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“Two big lamps with unpolished glass globes bathed in a soft and abundant light the four white walls of the room, with a glass case of arms, the brass hilt of Henry Gould's cavalry sabre on its square of velvet, and the water-color sketch of the San Tomé gorge.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“They leaned side by side on the rail of the little balcony, very friendly, having exhausted politics, giving themselves up to the silent feeling of their nearness, in one of those profound pauses that fall upon the rhythm of passion.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“To each his fate, shaped by passion or sentiment.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction—that, señores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard