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9391ed7
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Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
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thoughts
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Joseph Conrad |
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0eac78e
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I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more--the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort--to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires--and expires, too soon, to..
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youth
life
disillusionment
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Joseph Conrad |
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fd1bb46
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We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
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mankind
humanity
family
home-town
prodigal-daughters
prodigal-sons
stomping-grounds
old-friends
homecoming
reunion
return
home
ghosts
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Joseph Conrad |
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d81a085
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The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future into the unpleasant realities of the present hour. An unpleasant voice too. He had heard it for many years, and with every year he liked it less. No matter; there would be an end to all this soon.
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Joseph Conrad |
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7fc8c5c
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it may be that it is this very dulness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand so much--everything--in a flash--before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.
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Joseph Conrad |
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00acb9d
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For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.
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Joseph Conrad |
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a201bbb
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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.
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Joseph Conrad |
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6820caa
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He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them - the ship; and so is their country - the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by..
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Joseph Conrad |
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67f3755
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No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly..
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Joseph Conrad |
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984b4cc
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She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.
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Joseph Conrad |
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bf58e60
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Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus--yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new d..
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Joseph Conrad |
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6f0983f
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One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.
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good
life
wisdom
experience
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Joseph Conrad |
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752c450
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And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
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mankind
humanity
fear
truth
ambitious-minds
ambitious-people
driven
idlesness
self-motivated
haunted
human-condition
grace
self-loathing
self-hate
fall
fire
pride
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Joseph Conrad |
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595c27e
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I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
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mortality
depression
death
sadness
dark-sky
grey-sky
overcast
morose
doomed
temporal
depressing
lost-love
pity
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Joseph Conrad |
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48b15af
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His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.
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evil
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Joseph Conrad |
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20a8f74
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the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint...
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Joseph Conrad |
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34e16a6
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The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
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Joseph Conrad |
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8e99e9f
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Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly ..
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Joseph Conrad |
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5352743
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The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled--the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden..
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Joseph Conrad |
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4aa400f
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For you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.
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Joseph Conrad |
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93c3e4a
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Preparation for the future was necessary, and he was willing to admit that the great change would perhaps come in the upheaval of a revolution. But he argued that revolutionary propaganda was a delicate work of high conscience. It was the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings.
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education
revolution
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Joseph Conrad |
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bece9b6
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Ell per mi era nomes un nom. El veieu? Veieu la historia? Veieu alguna cosa? Em sembla com si us intentes explicar un somni, i es en va, perque cap narracio d'un somni no ens pot transmetre la sensacio de somni, aquella barreja d'absurditat, de sorpresa i d'atordiment en un estremiment de lluita i rebel*lio, aquella sensacio de ser abassegat per aquell punt increible, que es la veritable essencia dels somnis.
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Joseph Conrad |
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f822beb
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It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency -- the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends.
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Joseph Conrad |
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6ab1b96
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Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
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Joseph Conrad |
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aa25454
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But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ..
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Joseph Conrad |
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0af67ee
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The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery atmosphere. And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless..
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Joseph Conrad |
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806202b
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Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.
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Joseph Conrad |
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28bae7f
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It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship's routine, which I have seen soothe--at least for a time--the most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship's life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also ..
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Joseph Conrad |
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109c399
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By all that's wonderful, it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself -- or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here -- you all had something out of life: money, love -- whatever one gets on shore -- and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks -- and sometimes a chance to feel your strength -- that only -- what you all regret?" And we..
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Joseph Conrad |
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727d7be
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Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest,
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Joseph Conrad |
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6ab9c95
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And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank
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Joseph Conrad |
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fe06872
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They (Romans) were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth which mostl..
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Joseph Conrad |
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7108c06
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The way of even the most justifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolued him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually s..
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Joseph Conrad |
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98b4059
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True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion.
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Joseph Conrad |
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5c3c993
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Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or grit..
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Joseph Conrad |
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6451868
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In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.
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night-sky
nature-s-beauty
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Joseph Conrad |
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4397dc5
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the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty--all equal before sleep, death's brother.
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Joseph Conrad |
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0afb768
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It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.
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Joseph Conrad |
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cee5506
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He steered for me - I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware of when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory - like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.
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Joseph Conrad |
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43ac53f
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The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.
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Joseph Conrad |
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bad97b2
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Any work aspiring to be art however humble should carry its justification in every line.
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Joseph Conrad |
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191e002
|
the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities ... His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring--and soo..
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Joseph Conrad |
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fc83796
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And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.
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Joseph Conrad |
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d48c2ae
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oh youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it!
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Joseph Conrad |