February 24, 2009


Favorite Quote

You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. (Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad.)

posted by Sheila Ryan in literature, quotes 

comments

7 Responses to “Favorite Quote”

  1. Cindy Scroggins on February 24th, 2009 at 9:51 am

    That’s almost philosophy.

  2. Cooper Renner on February 24th, 2009 at 11:29 am

    Thank you for this!

  3. Lucy Foley on February 24th, 2009 at 1:50 pm

    Godammit it’s important to recognise this sometimes so we can cut all our dead hippo breathing selves some slack.

  4. Cindy Scroggins on February 24th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

    I seem to recall reading that hippos suffer from donkey envy. That explains a lot.

  5. Lucy Foley on February 24th, 2009 at 2:10 pm

    God I had almost forgotten that my current desktop image is a picture of a profoundly cute small hippo, its head peeping up out of a very peculiarly pastoral scene of meadow and daisies, and the hippo’s mouth is smeared with daisy. All over. I love this hippo. I love him, do you hear?

  6. Sheila Ryan on February 24th, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    I got to recollecting Heart of Darkness this morning after looking at a New York Times photo of Congolese gold mine workers. Actually, the black-and-white version of the image in the print edition is what really smacked me up-side the head. “Belgian Congo in 1890?” I asked myself.

  7. Phil Bebbington on February 24th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

    Okay, so I have this on the shelf and have never read it – perhaps a thread, book we bought intending to read and didn’t. This quote is wonderful, I’d read it for that alone, if I knew how.

    If nothing else, all this book talk is making me think about it.

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