Quotations from the introduction to the second edition of *Under Western Eyes*
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Truth alone is the justification of any fiction which can make the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time.
—Joseph Conrad, the introduction to the second edition of Under Western Eyes

The most terrifying reflection (I am speaking now for myself) is that all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the general—of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names.
—Joseph Conrad, the introduction to the second edition of Under Western Eyes

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

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

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 3 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Razumov thought to himself that this man entrusted with so much arbitrary power must have believed what he said or else he could not have gone on bearing the responsibility.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

It seemed to him bizarre that secrecy should play such a large part in the comfort and safety of lives.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"I suppose," thought Razumov, "that if I had made up my mind to blow out my brains on the landing I would be going up these stairs as quietly as I am doing it now. What's a man to do?"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Several times that night he woke up shivering from a dream of walking through drifts of snow in a Russia where he was as completely alone as any betrayed autocrat could be; an immense, wintry Russia which, somehow, his view could embrace in all its enormous expanse as if it were a map.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent....
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The light coming through the window seemed strangely cheerless, containing no promise as the light of each new day should for a young man.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He did nothing all that day; he neglected even to brush his hair. The idea of going out never occurred to him—and if he did not start a connected train of thought it was not because he was unable to think. It was because he was not interested enough.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

No doubt he was looking forward to the consummation of his martyrdom. A man who resigns himself to kill need not go very far for resignation to die.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He did not attempt to put his papers in order, either that evening or the next day—which he spent at home in a state of peculiar irresolution. This irresolution bore upon the question whether he should continue to live—neither more nor less. But its nature was very far removed from the hesitation of a man contemplating suicide.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Razumov envied the materialism of the thief and the passion of the incorrigible lover. The consequences of their actions were always clear and their lives remained their own.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 4 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

"He flew quite a long way into the yard. I raged like—like a—minotaur. The women clung to me and screamed, the fiddlers got under the table.... Such fun! My dad had to put his hand pretty deep into his pocket, I can tell you." He chuckled.

"My dad is a very useful man. Jolly good thing it is for me, too. I do get into unholy scrapes."

His elation fell. That was just it. What was his life? Insignificant; no good to anyone; a mere festivity.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

And was not all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and lies?
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Upon my word, we Russians are a drunken lot. Intoxication of some sort we must have: to get ourselves wild with sorrow or maudlin with resignation; to lie inert like a log or set fire to the house. What is a sober man to do, I should like to know? To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect. A man of imagination, however inexperienced in the art of narrative, has his instinct to guide him in the choice of his words, and in the development of the action. A grain of talent excuses many mistakes.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"In Russia," she went on, "all knowledge was tainted with falsehood. Not chemistry and all that, but education generally," she explained. The Government corrupted the teaching for its own purposes. Both her children felt that.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In any other country but their own she would have been certain of a great future for a man with the extraordinary abilities and the lofty character of her son—but in Russia....
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"With us in Russia the church is so identified with oppression, that it seems almost necessary when one wishes to be free in this life, to give up all hope of a future existence."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Everything is inconceivable," she said. "The whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas. And yet the world exists to our senses, and we exist in it."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Whenever two Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private life, their public utterances—haunting the secret of their silences.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"No news—good news," I said cheerfully, and we began to walk slowly side by side.

"Not in Russia," she breathed out so low that I only just caught the words.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Removed by the difference of age and nationality as if into the sphere of another existence, I produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb helpless ghost, of an anxious immaterial thing that could only hover about without the power to protect or guide by as much as a whisper.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

There is positively in all the range of human sentiments no joy and no sorrow that woman cannot understand, elevate, and spiritualize by her interpretation.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 5 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

I received the impression that behind these dark spectacles of his he could be as impudent as he chose.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"And no woman can remain sitting on the steps. Flowers, tears, applause—that has had its time; it's a mediaeval conception. The arena, the arena itself is the place for women!"

He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if giving it to her for a gift, and remained still, his head bowed in dignified submission before her femininity.

"The arena!... You must descend into the arena, Natalia."

He made one step backwards, inclined his enormous body, and was gone swiftly. The door fell to behind him. But immediately the powerful resonance of his voice was heard addressing in the ante-room the middle-aged servant woman who was letting him out. Whether he exhorted her too to descend into the arena I cannot tell. The thing sounded like a lecture, and the slight crash of the outer door cut it short suddenly.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Your brother believed in the power of a people's will to achieve anything?"

"It was his religion," declared Miss Haldin.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Reform is impossible. There is nothing to reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful of cruel—perhaps blind—officials against a nation."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution—not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions—in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"The true progress must begin after. And for that the right men shall be found. They are already amongst us. One comes upon them in their obscurity, unknown, preparing themselves...."

She spread out the letter she had kept in her hand all the time, and looking down at it—

"Yes! One comes upon such men!" she repeated, and then read out the words, "Unstained, lofty, and solitary existences."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Thinking it over, later on, while I walked slowly away from the Boulevard des Philosophes, I asked myself critically, what precisely was it that she wanted to know?
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In the educational establishment for girls where Miss Haldin finished her studies she was looked upon rather unfavourably. She was suspected of holding independent views on matters settled by official teaching.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

I am not ancient enough as yet to be strikingly decrepit. I have no long beard like the good hermit of a romantic ballad; my footsteps are not tottering, my aspect not that of a slow, venerable sage. Those picturesque advantages are not mine. I am old, alas, in a brisk, commonplace way.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Do you understand how frightful that is—nothing to look forward to! Sometimes I think that it is only in Russia that there are such people and such a depth of misery can be reached.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 6 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Upon my word, I would think that finances and all the rest of it are an invention of the devil; only that a belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

I have looked closely at what would seem inconceivable if one's own eyes had not to be trusted. I have looked at things that made me hate myself for my helplessness. I hated my hands that had no power, my voice that could not be heard, my very mind that would not become unhinged.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He said to himself that all this was not for him; the beauty of women and the friendship of men were not for him.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"He seems to be a man who has suffered more from his thoughts than from evil fortune."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

There is little logic to be expected on this earth, not only in the matter of thought, but also of sentiment.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"What's going on with us is of no importance—a mere sensational story to amuse the readers of the papers—the superior contemptuous Europe. It is hateful to think of. But let them wait a bit!"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

I paused, and for a moment sat listening to the footsteps of the few people passing up and down the broad central walk.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He thought it odious—oppressively odious—in its unsuggestive finish: the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"The very patronymic you are so civil as to use when addressing me I have no legal right to—but what of that? I don't wish to claim it. I have no father. So much the better. But I will tell you what: my mother's grandfather was a peasant—a serf. See how much I am one of you. I don't want anyone to claim me. But Russia can't disown me. She cannot!"

Razumov struck his breast with his fist.

"I am it!"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 7 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Peter Ivanovitch, meditating behind his dark glasses, became to him suddenly so odious that if he had had a knife, he fancied he could have stabbed him not only without compunction, but with a horrible, triumphant satisfaction. His imagination dwelt on that atrocity in spite of himself. It was as if he were becoming light-headed. "It is not what is expected of me," he repeated to himself. "It is not what is—I could get away by breaking the fastening on the little gate I see there in the back wall. It is a flimsy lock. Nobody in the house seems to know he is here with me. Oh yes. The hat! These women would discover presently the hat he has left on the landing. They would come upon him, lying dead in this damp, gloomy shade—but I would be gone and no one could ever...Lord! Am I going mad?" he asked himself in a fright.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Perfection itself would not produce that effect," pursued Peter Ivanovitch, "in a world not meant for it."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The record, which could not have been meant for anyone's eyes but his own, was not, I think, the outcome of that strange impulse of indiscretion common to men who lead secret lives, and accounting for the invariable existence of "compromising documents" in all the plots and conspiracies of history.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

An immense longing to make his way out of these grounds and to the other end of the town, of throwing himself on his bed and going to sleep for hours, swept everything clean out of his mind for a moment. "Is it possible that I am but a weak creature after all?" he asked himself, in sudden alarm.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The expression of her face was grave, intent; so grave that Razumov, after approaching her close, felt obliged to smile.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Fifteen years of a life like his make changes in a man. Lonely, like a crow in a strange country. When I think of Yakovlitch before he went to America—"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"But we women are in love with love, and with hate, with these very things I tell you, and with desire itself. That's why we can't be bribed off so easily as you men."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"But you must remember the definition of Cabanis: 'Man is a digestive tube.' I imagine now...."

"I spit on him."

"What? On Cabanis? All right. But you can't ignore the importance of a good digestion. The joy of life—you know the joy of life?—depends on a sound stomach, whereas a bad digestion inclines one to scepticism, breeds black fancies and thoughts of death."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 8 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

His uneasiness, his exasperation, his scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him that now they were blunted for ever.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Good, that," he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

It gave him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own mouth. The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

What had society to say to him? Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal I shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you--nothing except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread--but no consolation for your trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of your miserable life.

And so he laboured, he suffered, and he died.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

In these last words there was neither pride nor sadness. The bitterness too was gone.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

How un-Russian she looked, thought Razumov.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Inquire, investigate! I defy you, but I will not be played with."

He had spoken such words before. He had been driven to cry them out in the face of other suspicions. It was an infernal cycle bringing round that protest like a fatal necessity of his existence. But it was no use. He would be always played with. Luckily life does not last for ever.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The choking fumes of falsehood had taken him by the throat--the thought of being condemned to struggle on and on in that tainted atmosphere without the hope of ever renewing his strength by a breath of fresh air.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Razumov, listening quietly, thought: "It may be that she is trying to lull my suspicions to sleep. On the other hand, it is obvious that most of them are fools." He moved aside a couple of paces and, folding his arms on his breast, leaned back against the stone pillar of the gate.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

No four-footed beast could stand the filth and wretchedness so many human beings were condemned to suffer from in Russia.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 9 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Remorse, indeed! It was a striking example of your true conspirator's blindness, of the stupid subtlety of people with one idea.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He felt pity for Ziemianitch, a large neutral pity, such as one may feel for an unconscious multitude, a great people seen from above—like a community of crawling ants working out its destiny.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The insistence of the celebrated subversive journalist rankled in his mind strangely. Write. Must write! He! Write! A sudden light flashed upon him. To write was the very thing he had made up his mind to do that day. He had made up his mind irrevocably to that step and then had forgotten all about it.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The manner of his life, he felt, must be kept clear of every cause for suspicion or even occasion for wonder, down to such trifling occurrences as a delay in opening a locked door. "I wish I were in the middle of some field miles away from everywhere," he thought.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

And it must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov's case the bitterness of solitude from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"I understand your liberalism. I have an intellect of that kind myself. Reform for me is mainly a question of method. But the principle of revolt is a physical intoxication, a sort of hysteria which must be kept away from the masses."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

On certain days he was afraid that anyone addressing him suddenly in a certain way would make him scream out insanely a lot of filthy abuse.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

On the contrary, he liked his lodgings better than any other shelter he, who had never known a home, had ever hired before. He liked his lodgings so well that often, on that very account, he found a certain difficulty in making up his mind to go out. It resembled a physical seduction such as, for instance, makes a man reluctant to leave the neighbourhood of a fire on a cold day.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He had an uneasy recollection of having savagely told one or two innocent, nice enough fellows to go to the devil.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

From early morning till far into the night he wrote, he wrote for nearly a week; never looking at the time, and only throwing himself on the bed when he could keep his eyes open no longer.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"And what about my own happiness, eh? Haven't I got any right to it, just because I can think for myself?..."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

At that moment he was crossing the room slowly, intending to sit down on the sofa and try to compose his thoughts. But before he had got so far everything abandoned him—hope, courage, belief in himself, trust in men. His heart had, as it were, suddenly emptied itself. It was no use struggling on. Rest, work, solitude, and the frankness of intercourse with his kind were alike forbidden to him. Everything was gone. His existence was a great cold blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 10 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Let me remark that the Evil One, with his single passion of satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view, allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

It seems that the savage autocracy, no more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The power of Councillor Mikulin consisted in the ability to seize upon that sense, that side in the men he used. It did not matter to him what it was--vanity, despair, love, hate, greed, intelligent pride or stupid conceit, it was all one to him as long as the man could be made to serve.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"We have said everything to each other by now, Kirylo Sidorovitch," said the high official feelingly, pressing Razumov's hand with that unreserved heartiness a Russian can convey in his manner.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"I have down there the best trotter of dad's stables and a light sledge. We shall do thirty miles before the moon sets, and find some roadside station...."

Razumov looked up amazed. The journey was decided--unavoidable. He had fixed the next day for his departure on the mission. And now he discovered suddenly that he had not believed in it. He had gone about listening, speaking, thinking, planning his simulated flight, with the growing conviction that all this was preposterous. As if anybody ever did such things! It was like a game of make-believe. And now he was amazed! Here was somebody who believed in it with desperate earnestness.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The futility of all this overcame him like a curse. Even then he could not believe in the reality of his mission. He looked round despairingly, as if for some way to redeem his existence from that unconquerable feeling.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He gained the bridge and returned to the north shore, where he remembered having seen in one of the narrower streets a little obscure shop stocked with cheap wood carvings, its walls lined with extremely dirty cardboard-bound volumes of a small circulating library. They sold stationery there, too. A morose, shabby old man dozed behind the counter. A thin woman in black, with a sickly face, produced the envelope he had asked for without even looking at him. Razumov thought that these people were safe to deal with because they no longer cared for anything in the world.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

It is strange to think that, I won't say liberty, but the mere liberalism of outlook which for us is a matter of words, of ambitions, of votes (and if of feeling at all, then of the sort of feeling which leaves our deepest affections untouched), may be for other beings very much like ourselves and living under the same sky, a heavy trial of fortitude, a matter of tears and anguish and blood.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

A faintly ironic resignation is no armour for a vulnerable heart.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Under Western Eyes*, 11 of 12
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

She was of those who do not know how to heal themselves, of those who are too much aware of their heart, who, neither cowardly nor selfish, look passionately at its wounds—and count the cost.

Such thoughts as these seasoned my modest, lonely bachelor's meal.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

I lingered over my thoughts more than I should have done. One felt so helpless, and even worse—so unrelated, in a way. At the last moment I hesitated as to going there at all. What was the good?
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The blind was down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs. Haldin seated in the chair, in her usual attitude, looking out for some one, which had lately acquired the poignant quality of mad expectation.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

A broken-down, retired Russian official was to be found there sometimes in the evening. He was infinitely forlorn and wearisome by his mere dismal presence.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

I would have been glad to be of use in any way, and would have set off to fetch any man, young or old, for I had the greatest confidence in her common sense.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added—

"The storm shall drive him in."

"There's going to be a storm?" I asked.

"Why, yes!"

As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

There was in the immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of suffering without remedy.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

And then, he had said to himself, it would be over for all time—for all time. "It's lucky I don't believe in another world," he had thought cynically.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

The phantom of Haldin had been indeed walked over, was left behind lying powerless and passive on the pavement covered with snow. And this was the phantom's mother consumed with grief and white as a ghost. He had felt a pitying surprise. But that, of course, was of no importance. Mothers did not matter. He could not shake off the poignant impression of that silent, quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of sternness crept into his thoughts. These were the consequences. Well, what of it? "Am I then on a bed of roses?" he had exclaimed to himself, sitting at some distance with his eyes fixed upon that figure of sorrow. He had said all he had to say to her, and when he had finished she had not uttered a word. She had turned away her head while he was speaking. The silence which had fallen on his last words had lasted for five minutes or more. What did it mean?
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Razumov gave a start as though he had discovered himself cleverly trapped. He tried to smile, but could not manage it, and lowered his eyes.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"It is not the case with me—if you must know the whole truth. Your hopes have to deal here with 'a breast unwarmed by any affection,' as the poet says.... That does not mean it is insensible," he added in a lower tone.

"I am certain your heart is not unfeeling," said Miss Haldin softly.

"No. It is not as hard as a stone," he went on in the same introspective voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in that unwarmed breast of which he spoke.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

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

"One must look beyond the present." Her tone had an ardent conviction.

"The blind can do that best. I have had the misfortune to be born clear-eyed. And if you only knew what strange things I have seen! What amazing and unexpected apparitions!... But why talk of all this?"
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten; for without that there can be no union and no love."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"You've got very wet."

"Yes, I am washed clean," muttered Razumov, who was dripping from head to foot, and passed through the inner door towards the staircase leading to his room.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"After all, it is they and not I who have the right on their side?—theirs is the strength of invisible powers. So be it. Only don't be deceived, Natalia Victorovna, I am not converted. Have I then the soul of a slave? No! I am independent—and therefore perdition is my lot."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

She sat down and leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. The silence lasted for several minutes.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"Yes. I am leaving here to-morrow. My eyes are open at last and my hands are free now. As for the rest—which of us can fail to hear the stifled cry of our great distress? It may be nothing to the world."

"The world is more conscious of your discordant voices," I said. "It is the way of the world."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

"There are evil moments in every life."
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western eyes.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 1 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good deckchairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes—would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China—a soft thing; how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said—in their actions, in their looks, in their persons—could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

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

An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a hundred pounds round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the ship-wrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 2 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get—well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the subjugation more complete. Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth...
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

And he had been deliberating upon death—confound him! He had found that to meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the night.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He was then working for De Jongh, on my recommendation. Water-clerk.... You can’t imagine a mode of life more barren of consolation, less capable of being invested with a spark of glamour—unless it be the business of an insurance canvasser.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

To bury him would have been such an easy kindness! It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends. Perhaps he did take it too much to heart.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

...still the idea obtrudes itself that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters. He was not—if I may say so—clear to me. He was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either. There were his fine sensibilities, his fine feelings, his fine longings—a sort of sublimated, idealised selfishness. He was—if you allow me to say so—very fine; very fine—and very unfortunate. A little coarser nature would not have borne the strain; it would have had to come to terms with itself—with a grunt, or even with a guffaw; a still coarser one would have remained invulnerably ignorant and completely uninteresting.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 3 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

The time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

He, on his side, had that faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Stein lifted his hand. ‘And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘It seems to me that some would have been very fine—if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.’ ‘Whether his were fine or not,’ I said, ‘he knows of one which he certainly did not catch.’ ‘Everybody knows of one or two like that,’ said Stein; ‘and that is the trouble—the great trouble....’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I don’t know how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion—I don’t care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 4 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

I knew very well he was of those about whom there is no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we hang together.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imagination to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions—and safe—and profitable—and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone—and as short-lived, alas!
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The conquest of love, honour, men’s confidence—the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim’s successes there were no externals.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I probably didn’t realize, he said with a naive gravity, how much importance he attached to that token. It meant a friend; and it is a good thing to have a friend. He knew something about that.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Quotations from *Lord Jim*, 5 of 5
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

‘I—I love her dearly. More than I could tell. Of course one cannot tell. You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you see, absolutely necessary—to another person. I am made to feel that. Wonderful.’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of marsh, the primeval smell of fecund earth, seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open an immense portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky above our heads widened, a far-off murmur reached our ears, a freshness enveloped us, filled our lungs, quickened our thoughts, our blood, our regrets—and, straight ahead, the forests sank down against the dark-blue ridge of the sea.

I breathed deeply, I revelled in the vastness of the opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with a toil of life, with the energy of an impeccable world. This sky and this sea were open to me.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly gray. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

‘For the last time,’ she cried, menacingly, ‘will you defend yourself?’ ‘Nothing can touch me,’ he said in a last flicker of superb egoism. Tamb' Itam saw her lean forward where she stood, open her arms, and run at him swiftly. She flung herself upon his breast and clasped him round the neck.

‘Ah! but I shall hold thee thus,’ she cried.... ‘Thou art mine!’
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim