Joseph Conrad

As soon as the principal personages were seated, the verandah of the house was filled silently by the muffled-up forms of Lakamba’s female belongings.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway.

However, they were all waiting - all the sixteen or twenty pilgrims of them - for something; and upon my word it did not seem an uncongenial occupation, from the way they took it, though the only thing that ever came to them was disease - as far as I could see.

‘The groans of this sick person,’ he said, ‘distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.’

The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.

Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing, continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes.

In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible[.]

It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.

He became very cool and collected all at once. ‘I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,’ he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose.

As we sat over our vermuths he glorified the Company’s business, and by-and-by I expressed casually my surprise at him not going out there.

Native mats covered the clay walls; a collection of spears, assegais, shields, knives was hung up in trophies.

With the impetus of his rush the man drove straight on, his face suddenly gaping disfigured, with his hands open before him gropingly, as though blinded, and landed with terrific violence on his forehead, just short of Jim’s bare toes.

One voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live sheep out of the remnant of my sea-stock: not that I wanted him to do anything for me—he couldn’t, you know—but because his childlike belief in the sacred right to perquisites quite touched my heart.

Hirsch, with his arms tied behind his back, had been bundled violently into one of the smaller rooms. For many hours he remained apparently forgotten, stretched lifelessly on the floor. From that solitude, full of despair and terror, he was torn out brutally, with kicks and blows, passive, sunk in hebetude.

Inwardly she quaked, because she dreaded and admired the calm, self-contained character of her daughter Winnie, whose displeasure was made redoubtable by a diversity of dreadful silences.

It was unusually early for him; his whole person exhaled the charm of almost dewy freshness; [...]

I had somehow the impression that he was on the point of letting go the ladder to swim away beyond my ken.

I could get hold of nothing but of some commonplace phrases, those futile phrases that give the measure of our impotence before each other's trials.

This is like one of those Red-skin stories where the noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge follows the track and reads the signs of her fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinket dropped by the way.

A horrid mistrust of the whole house possessed me. I saw it in the light of a deadly trap.

Had I lived in the Middle Ages I am certain I would have believed that a talking bird must be possessed by the devil.