To me, the main themes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness are corruption and death. If you haven't yet read it (and there are a lot of young people here), you ought. If you've already read it, you might want to again. It means so much more to me now than it did years ago.
Some quotes/passages:
"The accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones."
"It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over."
"I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men- men, I tell you. But as I stood on the hillside, I foresaw in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther."
"I had no idea why he wanted to be sociable, but as we chatted in there it suddenly occured to me the fellow was trying to get at something - in fact, pumping me...
I couldn't possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was very pretty to see how he baffled himself, for in truth my body was full only of chills, and my head had nothing in it but that wretched steamboat business. It was evident he took me for a perfectly shameless prevaricator."
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."
"...No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."
"I don't like work - no man does - but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."
"The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."
"Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence - but more generally takes the form of apathy..."
"everything belonged to him [Kurtz] - but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible - it was not good for one either - trying to imagine."
"Kurtz - Kurtz - that means short in German - don't it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life - and death. He looked at least seven feet long."
"... I was unsound! Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.
I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, as I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for the moment it seemed to me as if I were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight opressing my breast, the smell of damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night..."
"Droll thing life is - that you can hope from it some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire for victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepicism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it be."
"He had summed up - he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had an appalling face of glimpsed truth - the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best - a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things - even this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through."
"'He [Kurtz] had faith - don't you see? he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything - anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.' 'What party?' I asked. 'Any party' answered the other. 'He was an - an - extremist' "
"All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul, his body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained only his memory and his Intended - and I wanted to give that up, too, to the past, in a way - to surrender personally all that remained of him with me to that oblivion which is the las word of our common fate."
