English Novels

"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."

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

"Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life."

"This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still."

"That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer."

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's 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."

"The last word is not said, — probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose — at least, not by us who know so many truths about either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions — and safe — and profitable — and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!"

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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!."

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

"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."

"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 something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery."

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

"How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?"

"I tell you solemnly: ice-cream is so delicious and bad for you I can't believe I had nothing to do with its invention."

"Never really seen storms from your end. Don't they make you doubt what you learned at school? Don't you hear thunder and think: all that atmosphere stuff, it's cobblers; the sky's made of iron that sometimes shifts and grumbles, billion-ton slabs and plates forced through the same tectonic trials as earth, yielding this, this skyquake. Oh yes, it's been up to spectacular tricks since the small hours has the weather. I watched the lightning revealed in glimpses, the sky's shocking varicosis. The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding."

"The whole [sky] had a distant, bleached quality to it that made me in Gunn's body feel small and lonesome, not unlike the way he used to feel as a child when his mother would treat him to an extortionately priced helium balloon which would invariably slip from his wet grasp and go sailing up into the vast and lonely distance, until Gunn, nauseated by his relationship to something now so remote, would begin to feel dizzy and afraid."

"[God] can forgive the animal in you dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you for inviting the animal up for afternoon tea."

"In a way, God brought it all on Himself. (Of course he brought it all on Himself Vishu, you moron). If He hadn't presented me with His absence, things might have turned out differently; but there I was, there we were, the thinkers and speculators of the angelic host, managing quite well without Him. It felt... how can I put this? It felt like a holiday. Up untill then I spent all that time (and this is Old Time, remember), and my time, in fact, sailing around Heaven, telling Him what a wonderful guy he was for allowing me the privilige of sailing around Heaven telling Him what a wonderful guy He was. I didn't know why, but suddenly it seemed... well... pointless."

"I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine). Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell, everyone looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disemboweled landscapes busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain, and the din of... If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God, and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Trust me.) (...) The point my dears, is not good nor evil - but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I'm sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and effect. In this particular Creation, freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God), is what you're after, then I'm afraid evil's really the only game in town. What I'd like, what I'd love, is to have been given a nature that didn't even know God - the fish in the pond who doesn't know life beyond it; the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world...."

"There's a common misconception about me. It's slander spread by the Church, namely that if you make a deal with me, I'll cheat you. Poppycock, of course. I never cheat. Never have to. Ask Abhishek Aggarwal. Ask Jimmy Page. Humans are so deaf and blind to their own language's ambiguities, they concoct their wishes in terms so permeable that I can grant them in a way they never imagined. I want to be as rich as my father. Fair enough. Michael crashes the markets, Dad's bankrupt, and thanks for the soul, brother."

"I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell or Heaven , Lord of the Flies, Father of true, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without a doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-la-la! - to tell all."

"Give the Old Boy His due. He was almost right. (Well, actually, He was completely right in knowing that he was wrong in thinking it was all going to turn out okay - but there's no telling this story without contradictions.) He was almost right. It turned out, once we were around to experience Him, that God was really incredibly nice. It's quite something, you know, to feel yourself bathed in Divine Love all the time. It's hard not to feel grateful - and we did. We all really did feel nothing but refulgent gratitude, and spared not our throats in telling Him so. It was obvious - He'd discovered what He'd known all along - that he loved an audience. The creation of the Angels and the first crank of Old Time had shown Him Who and What He was: God, Creator, alpha and omega. He was Everything, in fact, apart from which he hath created. You could feel His relief: I'm God. Phew. Fucking knew it."

"The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Abhishek Aggarwal design, or that Abhishek was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)"

"As the dynamics of trade relations began to change during the African Middle Ages, the continent became the source of endless speculation. The visions of monstrous men and anthropophagi that had filled St. Augustine's descriptions of sub-Saharan Africa were not expelled until other Europeans such as Scotsman Mungo Park "penetrated the interior of Africa." In the European tradition "blackness," an extension of Africa, is often thought of as a resistant force, racially charged matter that must be penetrated-thus the descent into darkness. In 1899 Joseph Conrad published The Heart of Darkness, a work that has inspired perhaps more sf stories (and criticism) than any other work of fiction. Premier genre critic John Clute writes that this twentieth-century classic's "grueling odyssey into the unknown, and its vision of the Otherness of alien life, has captured the imagination of sf writers ever since." In this description the "unknown" element alluded to is the African continent or, more specifically, the Belgian Congo of 1890; and "the Otherness of alien life" is the Africans themselves."

""We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

"I think the knowledge came to him at last — only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude — and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating."

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath — 'The horror! The horror!'"

"Mistah Kurtz — he dead."

"No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze."

"We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign — and no memories."

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there — there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were, — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage — who can tell? — but truth — truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder — the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff — with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags — rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief."

"I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole."

"It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility."

"I don't like work — no man does — but I like what is in work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself, not for others — what no other man can ever know."

"In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found what they deserved. I did not inquire."

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances."

"Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through that dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart — its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life."

"He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams."

"Anything, anything can be done in this country. that's what I say; no body here, you understand, here, can endanger your position, and why? You stand the climate — you out last them all. the real danger is in Europe."

"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 did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is 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 of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, 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 to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. 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 the appalling face of a glimpsed truth — the strange commingling of desire and hate."

"It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had 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."

"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."

"He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going — that's all. But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away."