Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 1 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Yet I confess that I have no comprehension of the Russian character. The illogicality of their attitude, the arbitrariness of their conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional...
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

His manner, too, was good. In discussion he was easily swayed by argument and authority. With his younger compatriots he took the attitude of an inscrutable listener, a listener of the kind that hears you out intelligently and then—just changes the subject.

This sort of trick, which may arise either from intellectual insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one’s own convictions, procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University, Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, third year’s student in philosophy, was looked upon as a strong nature—an altogether trustworthy man. This, in a country where an opinion may be a legal crime visited by death or sometimes by a fate worse than mere death, meant that he was worthy of being trusted with forbidden opinions.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Razumov was one of those men who, living in a period of mental and political unrest, keep an instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life. He was aware of the emotional tension of his time; he even responded to it in an indefinite way. But his main concern was with his work, his studies, and with his own future.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He was as lonely in the world as a man swimming in the deep sea.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

There was nothing strange in the student Razumov’s wish for distinction. A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He marvelled at this immediate escape. The work was done. He could hardly believe it. He fought with an almost irresistible longing to lie down on the pavement and sleep.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Others had fathers, mothers, brothers, relations, connexions, to move heaven and earth on their behalf—he had no one. The very officials that sentenced him some morning would forget his existence before sunset.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

When the day of you thinkers comes don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul—and that's resignation.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"'Who could bear life in our land without the bottle?' he says. A proper Russian man..."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The house was an enormous slum, a hive of human vermin, a monumental abode of misery towering on the verge of starvation and despair.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes