Heart Of Darkness Quotes

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.

Everything belonged to him–but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.

Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up – some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.

I saw that on Small Business Saturday, the president went shopping at a bookstore and bought 17 books, including “The Laughing Monsters,” “Being Mortal,” and “Heart of Darkness.” Or as the cashier put it, “You OK, man? Maybe a little ‘Chicken Soup for the Presidential Soul?’

When I do a novel, I don’t really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky–seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.

I prefer to believe the opposite – that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.

Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.

Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness loom huge in my development as a writer. I think I’m always trying to write Heart of Darkness – trying to explode an abstraction in concrete terms, although I am aware that Conrad’s story has a bit of baggage that I’d rather avoid in my work.

Truly I have looked in the very heart of darkness and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

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.