Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.