JOSEPH CONRAD HEART OF DARKNESS QUOTES

“The horror, the horror!”

“We live as we dream—alone.”

“The darkness of the jungle had entered into my soul.”

“I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.”

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”

“All a man likes to feel is that he has been missed.”

“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.”

“It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own.”

“We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!”

“It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief—positively for relief.”

“To the young and ardent imagination of the boy these arguments savoured of injustice.”

“There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world.”

“You should have seen the look on his face when the torch went out.”

“The endless reproaches of the wilderness, the craving for decency, the hunger for greatness to serve and the irresistible necessity of crime.”

“I had to deal with them, of course. I’ve made no mistakes. I would be a clever fellow if I could deceive myself.” QUOTES ABOUT BEING CONSUMED BY LOVE

“When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.”

“One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know.”

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.”

“Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched.”

“I took it up eagerly; and but for an accident—the fact that Wickham, the chief of the station, was killed accidentally in a scuffle with the natives—I would have never propagated to him.”

“The mystery of a ship under sail exercising the enchantment of distance.”

“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out.”

“The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while.”

“It was as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work.”

“It has been a colossal and inhuman phenomenon, though not entirely devoid of human interest.”

“Brickmaker is such a good fellow, too!”

“It was written twenty years ago. The volume was of the same size and shape as the papers in his desk, and it had something to do with Africa.”

“It is queer how we are made.”

“And this also, has been one of the dark places of the earth.”