yesterday i read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. it's brilliant.
you know those books that sort of move something within you? and you can feel a type of shift?
it was like that.

here are some of my favorite passages.

In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

... the silence of the land went home to one's very heart--its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not for others--what no man can ever know.

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence.

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. ... I have a voice too, and for good or eveil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.

The living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every living bush of the under-growth, might have been changed into stone, even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep--it seemed unnatural, like a state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf--then the night came suddenly alive and struck you blind as well.

... to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and from all sides at once, did this tumultous and mournful uproar arise.

The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared, swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.

... and then from the depths of the woods went out such a tremulous and prolonged wail of mournful fear and utter despair as may be imagined to follow the flight of the last hope from the earth.

... everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own ... He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land...

... I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist--obviously--in the sunshine.

I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if to be at the mercy of that atorcious phantom had been a dishonouring nesessity.

I saw him open his mouth wide--it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over and inscrutable purpose. ... Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky...

... for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night...

There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces.

His soul was mad ... it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose, to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. ... He struggled with himself too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw the inconveivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

... perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.

The vision seemed to enter the house with me-- ... the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart--the heart of a conquering darkness.

... she seemed as though she would remember and mourn for ever ... such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time ... I saw her and him in the same instant of time--his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard them together.

... the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmers of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the wisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness.

'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her--from which I could not even defend myself.

It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head...