Joseph Conrad

“ Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the eastern board; tops of islands fringing the German shore. While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves—and for all their manifest solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light—another passenger came out on deck. ”

“ Besides being thirty-six times longer than the usual Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey, which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive, like an enticing mirage.
And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were excited. It's no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. ”

“ The most innocent of passions takes the edge off one's judgement. The desire which obsessed me was simply the desire of travel. And that being so, it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the continent. My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future—the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession, the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace. ”

“ Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping along cautiously, with the unlighted, war-blighted, black coast close on one, and sudden death on the other hand. For all the space we steamed through on that Sunday evening must be now one great mine field, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot, perhaps, where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy importance. ”

“ I was pleased to show my companions what Polish country life was like and the town where I was at school, before my boys got too old, and gaining an individual past of their own should lose the fresh sympathies of their age. It is only in this short understanding of youth that perhaps we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the trouble of another soul. For youth all is reality, and with justice; since they can apprehend so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. ”

“ It is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must be carried off by a jaunty bearing—a sort of thing I am not capable of. Rather than be thought to be a mere jaunty cripple I allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments. It had been pointed out to me that those were nations not far removed from a savage state. Their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding pigs. The complex material civilization of Europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by war. ”

“ It was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost amongst the thick growth of houses, like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway, as if by a secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder-city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy which the great Master knew so well how to bring out by magic of his great and understanding love. ”

“ I felt, too, that this journey so suddenly entered upon was bound to take me away from daily life's actualities at every step. I felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship's passengers. ”

“ I remembered only that not long before he had visited London, but that memory was lost in a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked. Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance had been archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an archduke? And now he was no more, and with a certain atrocity of circumstance which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. ”

“ Singly, and in small companies of two or three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead, as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store, away there, below the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam-vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that this is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. ”

“ There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night—or a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea is also called the German Ocean) —when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than to float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable manner. ”

“ It had been the object of careful study for some days past. The fact that I could take a conveyance at the station had never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand cabs. A strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one's life by means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom. ”

“ Each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. ”

“ The forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest—which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the more precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness, rather than possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and more plainly that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past ”

“ I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless heredity is merely a phantasy, there should have been fibre which would quicken at the sight, the atmosphere, the memories, of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood received its first independent impressions. ”

“ He trod the deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot, while his breast (and to some extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later, I could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, the first that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian Army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine, active boys are orphans by now. ”

“ There are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper stream of causes depends not on individualities which, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by the destiny which no murder had ever been able to placate, divert or arrest. ”

“ I HAVE never believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all if the assassination is of the dynastic order. I don't know how far murder can ever approach the efficiency of a fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient either of impatient hope or hurried despair. ”

“ From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very scattered, very solid and motionless against an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line. ”

“ And, behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those self-denying words. ”

“ I remained on deck till we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so over-lighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar, as a working implement, shall become presently as obsolete as the sail. The pilot boarded us in a motor dinghy. More and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. ”

“ An ineradicable, invincible provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively, as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned. ”

“ Everything in the subdued incomplete night life around the Mansion House went on normally, with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable night life of millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles. ”

“ Yet in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it,” that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or mere niggers, and with a feeling of superiority freeing their hands of all moral bonds and anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the “perfect man's burden.” ”

“ It has become the intoxicated slave of its own detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic times another sort of war doctrine has been inculcated to a nation, and held out to the world. ”

“ War does not pay. There had been even a book written on that theme—an attempt to put pacifism on a material basis. Nothing more solid could have been imagined on this trading and manufacturing globe. War was bad business! ”

“ As to alarm I pointed out that fear is natural to man and even salutary. It has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. ”

“ Mankind had been demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances. Its spirit apparently is so weak now, and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance. ”

“ This is not the time, and perhaps not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust any one, to appeal to any one, to look for help from any quarter ”

“ Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a seaway, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace. ”

“ Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man. ”

“ Wars not inferior in the greatness of the stake, and in the fierce animosity of feelings. During that one which was finished a hundred years ago, it happened that while the English fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself, offered to the maritime Prefect of the port and to the French Admiral, an invention which would sink the unsuspecting English ships one after another—or at any rate, most of them. ”

“ He spoke English with the accent of our captain's “wonderful people,” and proceeded to give me the history of the family's crossing the Atlantic in a White Star ship. They remained in England just the time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths of the ship, I suppose) were naturally a little tired.
At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. “Hurrah!" he cried under his breath, “The first German light! ”