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

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
Unexciting
Clamour
Wrestled
Contest
Contests
Imagine
Death

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
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Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.
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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.
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A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon
Joseph Conrad
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Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.
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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.
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You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
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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.
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The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
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The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.
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Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
Joseph Conrad
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Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
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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.
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Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.
Joseph Conrad
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An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
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All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
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His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.
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As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
Joseph Conrad