History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

We live as we dream - alone.

The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.

When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death.

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts.

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.