Quote

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.

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
Love
Mere
Glance
Creatures
Pause
Tell
Glances
Truth
Drowning
Ever
Pauses
Enough
Impulse
Straw
Make
Saved
Gothic
Men
Despair
Straws

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I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.
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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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But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.
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Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
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In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
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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.
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I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.
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Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
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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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The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death
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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.
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In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
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Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
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Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.
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All one's work might have been better done but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
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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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There is something haunting in the light of the moon it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.
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Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
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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.
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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
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