Important Quotations Explained
1. “The
word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would
think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew
through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never
seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness
surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something
great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for
the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”
2. “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.”
3. “It
was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well,
you know, that was the worst of it—the 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?”
4. “The
brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing
us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress;
and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of
his heart into the sea of inexorable time. . . . I saw the time
approaching when I would be left alone of the party of 'unsound
method.'”
5. “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. . . . He had summed up—he
had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man.”
