Joseph Conrad

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence…

— Joseph Conrad

“The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her…

— Joseph Conrad

“She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of…

— Joseph Conrad

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

— Joseph Conrad

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

— Joseph Conrad

There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.

— Joseph Conrad

“You see we had on the whole liked him well enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest one…

— Joseph Conrad

“She left a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, and two vanishing trails of foam on the water.”

— Joseph Conrad

“But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it,…

— Joseph Conrad

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the…

— Joseph Conrad

The vision seemed to enter the house with me-the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the…

— Joseph Conrad

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as…

— Joseph Conrad

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,…

— Joseph Conrad

The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days…

— Joseph Conrad

“Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval…

— Joseph Conrad

“Oh the glamour of youth! Oh the fire of it, more dazzling than the flames of the burning ship, throwing a magic…

— Joseph Conrad

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But…

— Joseph Conrad

[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of…

— Joseph Conrad

In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs…

— Joseph Conrad

“The unwholesome-looking little moral agent of destruction exulted silently in the possession of personal prestige, keeping in check this man armed with…

— Joseph Conrad

“His instinct of a successful man had taught him long ago that, as a general rule, a reputation is built on manner…

— Joseph Conrad

They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so…

— Joseph Conrad

“No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and…

— Joseph Conrad

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can…

— Joseph Conrad

“I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages…

— Joseph Conrad

“There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in…

— Joseph Conrad

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried…

— Joseph Conrad

“I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the…

— Joseph Conrad

“The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of a over-burdened earth had weighted their…

— Joseph Conrad

“And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank”

— Joseph Conrad

“Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.”

— Joseph Conrad

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but…

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

“Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies…

— Joseph Conrad

“Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest,”

— Joseph Conrad

“But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with…

— Joseph Conrad

“To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to…

— Joseph Conrad

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the…

— Joseph Conrad

“And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory-like…

— Joseph Conrad

“My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography—and this can hardly be denied, since…

— Joseph Conrad