Quotes from Heart of Darkness

“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.”

Marlow on the deck of a yawl in the Thames, before the African story begins. The sentence is the closest the novella comes to plain anti-imperialist statement, and Conrad puts it on page two so the reader cannot say they were not warned. The qualifying clauses (when you look into it too much) preview Marlow's compromise: he can see the cost and still complete the trip.

“What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea, something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”

Marlow's hedge, immediately after the previous quote. Notice the religious vocabulary: bow down, offer a sacrifice. Conrad has Marlow propose that empire can be redeemed by sincere belief, and then spends the next eighty pages showing belief itself going mad in the jungle. The novella is partly a long refutation of the sentence Marlow speaks in chapter one.

“We live, as we dream, alone.”

Marlow interrupting his own narration to address his listeners on the boat. The line is the novella's epistemology: Conrad does not believe one mind can fully reach another. Marlow keeps saying this in different forms because the story he is telling is, by his own argument, untellable. The act of telling is itself part of what is broken.

“Exterminate all the brutes!”

The last line, in pencil, scrawled at the end of Kurtz's seventeen-page report on the Suppression of Savage Customs. The report itself is high-minded; the postscript is the truth that the high-mindedness was always going to lead to. Conrad does not allow the reader to separate the two documents. They are the same author at different stages of his honesty.

“The horror! The horror!”

Kurtz's last words, whispered as he dies on the boat. Conrad refuses to specify the referent. Marlow hears them as a verdict on Kurtz's own actions, on Europe, on existence; the reader can choose. The genius of the line is its grammatical incompleteness: it is exclamation without subject, and the novella as a whole is in the same condition, gesturing at something it cannot name.

“Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

Reported by Marlow as the announcement of Kurtz's death. Four words. Conrad gives the death sentence to a peripheral African character in pidgin, the only language the white men have allowed him. The line is sometimes quoted as racism, sometimes as critique of racism; both readings are correct. Conrad's prose does the cruel thing and registers its cruelty at the same time, which is the most uncomfortable feature of the novella.

“It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

Marlow describing the jungle as the steamer goes upriver. The vocabulary (implacable, brooding, inscrutable) is the rhetoric Conrad has trained Marlow in for decades at sea, and it is breaking down. He cannot find precise words for what he is seeing because the jungle is not, in fact, brooding; it is just there, indifferent. The novella's prose is repeatedly caught in this gap between rhetoric and what rhetoric is for.

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”

Marlow's most quoted image, and one of the novella's most criticised. The trope (Africa as primordial, Europe as evolved) is the standard nineteenth century racist geography. Conrad puts it in his narrator's mouth and lets the rest of the story complicate it: the supposedly primordial Africans behave better than the supposedly civilised Europeans for two hundred pages. The line is wrong about what it describes, and Conrad knows.

“He was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it.”

Marlow's verdict on Kurtz, told back in London. The three short sentences are doing one job: they keep Marlow from saying what Kurtz actually said. Conrad's narrator habitually pulls back to praise at exactly the moment specificity would damage the people involved. The novella is partly a study in how euphemism is one of the engines of empire.

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.”

Marlow, ill after Kurtz's death, on his own near-dying experience. The pivot is the adjective unexciting. Conrad will not give Marlow the consolation of a profound dying revelation. Death is not the climax; it is administrative. The line is also Marlow's quiet rebuke to Kurtz, who in death tried to make horror sound like discovery.

“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie.”

Marlow recalling how he told Kurtz's fiancee that her name was Kurtz's last word, when in fact the last words were the horror. The novella's last major moral choice is a lie. Conrad is not condemning Marlow for it; he is showing that civilisation, at its best, sometimes requires lies told to people who would not survive the truth. Whether this is a defence of decency or a confession of empire's habit is left to the reader.