Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conradwas a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 December 1857
CountryPoland
Joseph Conrad quotes about
His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.
The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.
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".
I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.
The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness
Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
Between the conception and the creationbetween the emotion and the responseFalls the shadow
Between the conception and the creation between the emotion and the response Falls the shadow
As to honour you know it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
The revolutionary spirit is mightily convenient in this: that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.