Conrad Quotes

“I wondered if this was the way old crushes died, with a whimper, slowly, and then, just like that—gone.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“Do you remember infinity?”
Slowly, I turned around. “What about it?”
Tossing something toward me, he said, “Catch.”
I reached out and caught it in the air. A silver necklace. I held it up and examined it. The infinity necklace.
It didn’t shine the way it used to; it looked a bit coppery now. But I recognized it. Of course I recognized it.
“What is this?” I asked.
“You know what it is,” he said.
I shrugged. “Nope, sorry.”
I could see that he was both hurt and angry. “Okay, then. You don’t remember it. I’ll remind you. I bought
you that necklace for your birthday.”
My birthday.
It had to have been for my sixteenth birthday. It was the only year he ever forgot to buy me a birthday
present—the last summer we’d all been together at the beach house, when Susannah was still alive.”
― Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer

“Wait!" he yelled.
I didn't turn around, I walked faster. Then I heard him slam his fist on the hood of his car. I almost stopped.
Maybe I would have if he'd followed me. But he didn't. He got in his car and he left, just like he said he would.”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“On the day of his mother’s funeral, to the boy I loved more than I had ever loved
anything or anyone, I said, “Go to hell.”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“Your name?"The movements of the man's mouth didn't quite match what he was saying, so seeing him speak was a bit like watching a badly dubbed film.

"Alex Gardiner," Alex said.

"Your real name?"

"I just told you."

"You lied. Your real name is Alex Rider."

"Why ask if you think you know?”
― Anthony Horowitz, Skeleton Key

“Strange though it is,Sarov still cares about you. He told me to leave you alone. But I think, this time, I must disobey the general. You are mine! And I intend to make you suffer..."

"Just talking to you makes me suffer," Alex said.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Skeleton Key

“Conrad calling me again—that was enough to make me forget how to breathe.”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“This mountain of a man was learning that his considerable might- which he'd clearly relied on for everything- was futile with her. ”
― Kresley Cole, Dark Needs at Night's Edge

“You know what? Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “Cory Wheeler already asked me. I can tell him I changed my mind.”
“Who the hell is Corky Wheeler?”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“Is it so impossible that Conrad Fisher would like me?”
― Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

“I libri le aprivano mondi nuovi e le facevano conoscere persone straordinarie che vivevano una vita piena di avventure. Viaggiava su antichi velieri con Joseph Conrad. Andava in Africa con Ernest Hemingway e in India con Kipling. Girava il mondo restando seduta nella sua stanza, in un villaggio inglese.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“The dagger pin is all I have left. It is comfort and pain, both, because it reminds me of all I’ve had, held, and had taken from me.
It is my pen, too. With it, I write my story, again and again, in the walls. So I don’t forget. So it becomes real.
I think of: Conrad’s hands, Rachel’s dark hair, Lena’s rosebud mouth, how when she was an infant, I used to sneak into her bedroom and hold her while she slept. Rachel never let me—from birth, she screamed, kicked, would have woken the household and the street.
But Lena lay still and warm in my arms, submerged in some secret dreamland.
And she was my secret: those nighttime hours, that twin heartbeat space, the darkness, the joy.”
― Lauren Oliver, Annabel

“They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Que coisa engraçada é a vida - esse arranjo misterioso de lógica impiedosa - visando algum desígnio fútil. O máximo que dela se pode esperar é um certo conhecimento de si mesmo - que chega tarde demais - uma safra de remorsos inextinguíveis (...) Se é essa a forma de sabedoria suprema, a vida é um enigma ainda maior do que pensam alguns de nós. Estive a um fio de cabelo da última oportunidade de me pronunciar, e descobri humilhado que provavelmente não teria nada a dizer. E é por isso que afirmo que Kurtz foi um homem notável. Ele tinha alguma coisa a dizer. E disse. (CONRAD, Joseph. Coração das trevas. Trad. Sergio Flaksman. São Paulo: Companhia de Bolso, 2008. p. 110-111).”
― Joseph Conrad, O Coração das Trevas

“He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vein 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... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. We live, as we dream, alone...”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Catching him off guard felt like a good sign. He had a million walls. Maybe if I just started talking, he wouldn't have time to build up a new one.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“The old pull, the tide drawing me back in. I kept getting caught in this current—first love, I mean. First love kept making me come back to this, to him. He still took my breath away, just being near him. I had been lying to myself the night before, thinking I was free, thinking I had let him go. It didn't matter what he said or did, I'd never let him go.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“Le sabordage de l'âme devrait être enseigné dans les écoles de marine".
Le Voyageur de l'inquiétude”
― Olivier Weber

“He is romantic—romantic,” he repeated. “And that is very bad—very bad. . . . Very good, too,” he added. “But is he?” I queried.
‘“Gewiss,” he said, and stood still holding up the candelabrum, but without looking at me. “Evident! What is it that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes him—exist?”
‘At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim’s existence—starting from a country parsonage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world—but his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. “Perhaps he is,” I admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation made me lower my voice directly; “but I am sure you are.” With his head dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again. “Well—I exist, too,” he said.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“It was then that Brown took his revenge upon the world which, after twenty years of contemptuous and reckless bullying, refused him the tribute of a common robber’s success. It was an act of cold-blooded ferocity, and it consoled him on his deathbed like a memory of an indomitable defiance. . . . Thus Brown balanced his account with the evil fortune. Notice that even in this awful outbreak there is a superiority as of a man who carries right—the abstract thing—within the envelope of his common desires. It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution—a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“It was a total catch-22, like a contradiction in terms.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“The horror, the horror.”
― Joseph Conrad

“Слънцето потъна неусетно в ослепително бяла светлина, след това стана мътночервено и изгуби лъчите и топлината си, сякаш изгасна изведнъж, поразено смъртоносно при допира с мрака, който тежеше над нас.”
― Джоузеф Конрад, Heart of Darkness

“е са били завоеватели, а за това е нужна груба сила, с която не можеш да се хвалиш, когато я имаш, защото силата е само една случайност — резултат от слабостта на другите”
― Джоузеф Конрад, Heart of Darkness

“Те са били завоеватели, а за това е нужна груба сила, с която не можеш да се хвалиш, когато я имаш, защото силата е само една случайност — резултат от слабостта на другите.”
― Джоузеф Конрад, Heart of Darkness

“«[...] Il massimo che ci si possa aspettare è una certa conoscenza di se stessi - che arriva troppo tardi - una raccolta di rimpianti inestinguibili. Io ho combattuto con la morte. È la lotta meno emozionante che possiate immaginare. Si svolge in un grigiore impalpabile, senza terreno sotto i piedi, con il vuoto attorno, senza spettatori, senza incitamenti, senza gloria, senza la grande smania di vittoria, senza la grande paura della sconfitta, in un'atmosfera malsana di tiepido scetticismo, senza credere più di tanto nel vostro diritto, né, tantomeno, in quello del vostro avversario. Se questa è la forma della suprema saggezza, allora la vita è un enigma più grande di quanto alcuni di noi non credano.»”
― Joseph Conrad, Cuore di tenebra

“You can't kill me," I said. "You don't have the strength."
"In reality, I was already dead. My fate had been sealed by my own stupidity, but I wasn't going down with a whimper. No, the last of my life might be spinning away, leaving me with only a dwindling of scrolls and my wits, but I'd rather go out fighting- or at least laughing.”
― Annabeth Albert, Conventionally Yours

“Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Visitors noted that Rom’s garden was decorated with polished skulls buried in the ground, the garden gnomes of the Congo then. But Kurtz’s compound has no skulls buried in the ground but rather freshly severed “heads on the stakes” that “seemed to sleep at the top of that pole.” As the British scholar Johan Adam Warodell notes, none of the “exclusively European prototypes” for Kurtz advanced by woke professors and historians followed this native mode of landscape gardening. By contrast, dozens of accounts of African warlords and slavers in the Congo published before 1898 described rotting heads on poles (“a wide-reaching area marked by a grass fence, tied to high poles, which at the very top were decorated with grinning, decomposing skulls,” as one 1888 account had it). Far from being “one of the most scathing indictments of [European] imperialism in all literature,” as Hochschild declares it, Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of the absence of European imperialism in all literature. Kurtz is a symbol of the pre-colonial horrors of the Congo, horrors that the EIC, however fitfully, was bringing to an end.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.