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Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
Joseph Conrad
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Joseph Conrad
Age: 66 †
Born: 1857
Born: December 3
Died: 1924
Died: August 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Berdichev
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
Didn
Mean
Sank
Thing
Drown
Think
Suicidal
Thinking
Swim
Till
Liked
Meant
More quotes by Joseph Conrad
It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
Joseph Conrad
For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.
Joseph Conrad
It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.
Joseph Conrad
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
Joseph Conrad
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
Joseph Conrad
I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality
Joseph Conrad
Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.
Joseph Conrad
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
Joseph Conrad
A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.
Joseph Conrad
In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.
Joseph Conrad
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.
Joseph Conrad
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
Joseph Conrad
I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
Joseph Conrad
A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
Joseph Conrad
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Joseph Conrad
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.
Joseph Conrad
There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
Joseph Conrad
