heart of darkness quotes

The grove of death	"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. "They were dying slowly- it was very clear they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air- and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young- almost a boy- but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held- there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck- Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge- an ornament- a charm- a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.	This comes from Marlow's account of the Company Station on the coast - that is, the first of the stations. Notice the effort to see clearly - to record clearly what he saw. The passage attempts the clarity, the clear record of a series of impressions - like a witness's report. This piece of white worsted - because it is so arbitrary, without definite point or meaning - seems like the arbitrariness of fact - just an odd, contingent detail. It is this kind of detail which mimics the concrete particulars of factual writing. (The piece of white thread also stands for the absurdity of all that Europe has done for this native. The moment of death, the closedness of one individual off from another, will also become major notes in the book. But, at this point, the writing can be taken just as a piece of reporting.)
Marlow's style of story	The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. Commentary: Note how this alters how meaning is usually thought of: as something contained - and therefore definite. Marlow's stories depend on suggestion, have a kind of unlimited meaning, expand potentially endlessly. (Relate this perhaps to Turn of the Screw's avoidance of a definite ending - a refusal to allow the reader a clear, unambiguous answer to what really has happened.) This model also suggests one aspect of the style in Heart of Darkness - its deliberate 'vagueness', abstraction and unfixed impressions.	note the deliberate irony of Conrad's tone: 'moonshine' would usually be taken as being linked to fantasy, even nonsense. The irony is at his own expense - a kind of self-deprecatory caution - since he knows how far he wants to eventually move the reader to accept large themes, great implications - all arising from what appears to be only a slim novel.