Lord Jim

"I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works."

"There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten — before the end is told — even if there happens to be any end to it."

"There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea."

"Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!."

"For it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge."

"The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind."

"There is a weird power in a spoken word... And a word carries far — very far — deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space."

"It is when we try to grapple with another mans intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun."

"I respected the intense, almost passionate, absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable and defying destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues displaying a splendour unmarred by death."

"Going home must be like going to render an account."

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns."

"They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything."