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
He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.
I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come and wait for the turn of the tide.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.