Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much - everything - in a flash - before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. (p. 105)

He lived surrounded by deceitful ghosts, by austere shades. (p. 113)

Marlowe: I was no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and evil. (p. 136)

Marlowe: I cannot say I had ever seen him distinctly - not even to this day, after I had my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt whic is the inseparable part of our knowledge. (p. 162)

... the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art? (p. 206)

That was all then - and there shall be nothing more; there shall be no message, unless such as each of us can interpret for himself from the language of facts, that are so often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words. (p. 250)

Then Jim understood. He had retreated from one world, for a small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of his own hands, had fallen in ruins upon his head. (p. 301)


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