There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. - Joseph Conrad

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.