Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 2 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

"Call him, wake him up," he faltered out.

The other set down his light, stepped back and launched a kick at the prostrate sleeper.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Together with the persisting sense of terrible danger he was conscious now of a tranquil, unquenchable hate.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Other men had somewhere a corner of the earth—some little house in the provinces where they had a right to take their troubles. A material refuge. He had nothing. He had not even a moral refuge—the refuge of confidence. To whom could he go with this tale—in all this great, great land?

Razumov stamped his foot—and under the soft carpet of snow felt the hard ground of Russia, inanimate, cold, inert...
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place—the irrational feeling that something may jump upon us in the dark—the absurd dread of the unseen.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"What is this Haldin? And what am I? Only two grains of sand. But a great mountain is made up of just such insignificant grains. And the death of a man or of many men is an insignificant thing."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Lights fell on the pavement where men in expensive fur coats, with here and there the elegant figure of a woman, walked with an air of leisure. Razumov looked at them with the contempt of an austere believer for the frivolous crowd.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered what he had meant to do all along.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

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. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes