Joseph Conrad Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Joseph Conrad with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“We live, as we dream—alone.”
Meaning & context
Marlow describes the difficulty of transferring the full inner texture of experience to another person, suggesting that some dimensions of consciousness remain irreducibly private.
Source details
Heart of Darkness, Part I, Project Gutenberg #219. Marlow says ‘We live, as we dream—alone’ while explaining to his listeners that the lived ‘life-sensation’ of an earlier period cannot be fully conveyed to another person. The line remains fictional narration inside Conrad's colonial-era novella rather than a clinical or universal psychological finding about loneliness.
Source identified2
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“The truth seems to be that it is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact.”
Meaning & context
Marlow reflects that an established event can continue to shape reputation and self-understanding even after a person tries to escape its consequences.
Source details
Lord Jim, Project Gutenberg #5658. Marlow’s narration concerns Jim’s effort to live beyond the Patna scandal; the sentence is literary reflection on memory, fact and moral consequence.
Source identified3
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“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.”
Meaning & context
The Professor collapses revolutionary violence and state policing into one contemptuous theory of power, revealing his alienated and absolutist political outlook.
Source details
The Secret Agent, Project Gutenberg #974. This is fictional dialogue spoken by the Professor, an extremist character; the novel does not present his equivalence between terrorism and policing as neutral political fact.