Charles Marlow Quotes

“the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.”

“Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!”

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

“What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....”

“I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace.”

“There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself;”

“After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that’ s supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump—eh? A blow on the very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and think of it—years after—and go hot and cold all over.”

“The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.”

“Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.”

“I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.”

“What made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?-the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.”

“I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.”

“Perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

“I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage;”

“I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her—from which I could not even defend myself.”

″‘His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me, ‘was in every way worthy of his life.‘”

″‘The last word he pronounced was—your name.‘”