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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

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
Fiction
History
Human
Humans
Nothing

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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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
Joseph Conrad
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For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.
Joseph Conrad
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I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.
Joseph Conrad
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One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.
Joseph Conrad
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Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
Joseph Conrad
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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
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
Joseph Conrad
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The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
Joseph Conrad
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You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
Joseph Conrad
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There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.
Joseph Conrad
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It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.
Joseph Conrad
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To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Joseph Conrad