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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.

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
Eating
Dead
Sleep
Hippo
Existence
Precarious
Literature
Grip
Keep
Sleeping
Time
Waking
Breathe

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The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.
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A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
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A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
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Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
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Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
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The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.
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History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
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Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
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Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
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Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
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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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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.
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The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
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It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
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The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.
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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
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That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.
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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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To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
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Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.
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